Students experience problems in housing sign-up process
Deciding where you are going to live during your college years is one of many important decisions you will have to make.
Whether you attend college far from home or close by, there are many different options—staying on campus, living off-campus or living at home.
Choosing to live either on or off campus also can require making more choices. For example, do you live in a house or an apartment off campus? Which apartment complex should you choose? If you live on campus, which residence hall do you live in?
This is a decision that all currently enrolled students at the University of Indianapolis recently faced.
Cartoon by Abby Gross
On-campus housing sign-ups began toward the end of the month of February and were closed to all currently enrolled students on March 25.
However, signing up for on-campus housing was anything but easy to accomplish.
This year, UIndy opted to have all housing sign-ups occur online, as opposed to the in-person sign-ups of previous years.
This caused a variety of problems.
Students tried to sign up all at once as soon as they could, because they wanted the best choice of residence hall, floor and room number. As a result, the server did what it does best and crashed due to the large number of people all trying to access the same website at the same time. Some students also had to try to sign up multiple times because at some point while they were trying to sign up, they received error notifications, and the website refused to continue with the process.
Another difficulty that continues to frustrate students is the lack of space for students.
By the last day of sign-ups for Campus Apartments, when two-person groups could sign up, Campus Apartments were completely full, and a waiting list was started and grew the same day.
This was terrible news for upperclassmen, because sign-ups for Campus Apartments were the last of the housing sign-ups to occur. So, if there were no open rooms in Campus Apartments, a choice would have to be made from the other residence halls. However, some of the other residence halls, such as East and Central, were full because sign-ups had already been completed.
Most students were unaware that they could have chosen a “back-up” room.
In other words, students could have signed up for a room in another residence hall first, and then if they then signed up for somewhere else, the hold on the first room would have automatically dropped.
Unfortunately, the university failed to make this information known to most students. Therefore, the only on-campus option for those upperclassmen would be Warren Hall or Cory Bretz Hall.
Currently enrolled students filled all but two residence halls. This is yet another continuation of the issue of over-crowding in on-campus housing.
The new residence hall, currently scheduled to open the fall semester of 2012, hopefully will fix this problem, but may not. A new residence hall may attract new students, and right now the plan for the new residence hall is to catch up with the current enrollment level, not to allocate space for a larger group of enrollment.
According to the university’s website, UIndy currently has one category of admission for students known as “full-time contingent admission.”
One requirement for a student admitted under contingent admission is that the prospective student live on campus for their first year attending the university.
This requirement to live on campus adds to the problem of overcrowding.
There are many problems with on-campus housing but also a few solutions. The university either will have to continue to build new residence halls every few years, or admit fewer students. That choice is, of course, up to the university, but it can be agreed upon that something more needs to be done.
