It’s the first day of undergraduate housing selection. My group and I have a midday time for housing selection, and the four of us are feeling fairly confident we can get into Wolf Village. I’m staring at the group chat on my phone for what feels like an eternity.
I get a message. There are no four bedroom housing options left. We have to split the group, and since I won’t have access to room selection until the last day, I’m forced to pivot to off-campus housing.
We knew this could happen, and we even planned for it, but for the next month of my life, I would be caught in a whirlwind of housing decisions. Thankfully, I found one of the few last open bedrooms in the area, but all the while I kept hearing, “Next time, try to start in December.”
University Housing nor the students here should be held responsible for the lack of student housing. This problem is larger than just NC State, though the University’s response certainly could have been better.
This year, returning Wolf Village residents did not have priority, but Wolf Ridge residents did.
When I first applied to Wolf Village, I was informed my group and I would have returning priority and that this was true of all on-campus apartments. However, only Wolf Ridge residents were given returning priority this year.
This means all returning Wolf Ridge residents were able to claim their spots ahead of any new incoming groups, while Wolf Village groups had to compete with other incoming groups. This priority date is usually set the day before housing opens for everyone else. Wolf Ridge is on Centennial Campus where primarily engineering students study.
Whether or not returning priority for on-campus apartments should be something NC State continues to do is worth discussing; however, reserving returning priority only for some students seems like a very unbalanced move. It doesn’t take a lot of guesswork to assume Wolf Ridge filled up faster than Wolf Village and that groups aiming for Wolf Ridge would have pivoted to Wolf Village.
What makes this decision especially frustrating is that students who reside on Centennial Campus were given a courtesy no other student was. Given that College of Engineering students benefit the most from living on or near Centennial, this decision automatically benefits engineering students, current freshmen who have priority and incoming students who already have rooms reserved, but no one else.
I don’t necessarily take umbrage with certain students getting priority for housing, but as someone who lives on campus, I would like to know when I stop being a priority.
Everyone knows that this campus is overpopulated and that on-campus housing is sparse, but the systems we have in place for housing seem unclear and unequal at best. The last thing anyone wants housing to be, especially if you are not from the Triangle area, is unclear and unequal.
One NC State report from February 2021 found that 15% of students at NC State had experienced homelessness since the beginning of the pandemic. While the conditions three years ago were fairly different than now, we as a country are still experiencing record inflation and stagnating wages. If that 15% has remained static for the past three years, that means more than 5,500 students have experienced homelessness at NC State of the total enrollment.
The single most disorienting aspect of the current housing process is the fact that it takes place in February while most off-campus leases open up in December, meaning that, even if you apply for an off-campus apartment as soon as State housing dries up, you’re already two months behind.
This could be far more manageable if NC State developed some sort of guarantee system that students would have housing for a certain number of semesters before pushing them out. Longer guarantees could be made to students from low-income families who live farther away, while students who live closer from high-income families could have shorter guarantees.
But that doesn’t get at the entire issue: The UNC system isn’t big enough for its body of students.
NC State is not the only North Carolina or U.S. college dealing with an “over-admitting” issue. More people are going to college now than ever. This is why our acceptance rate gets lower while our admission numbers get higher. The solution to this is to build more universities, but unfortunately, there have been more closures of colleges and universities than openings in recent years.
This to say, we need our state government to invest in more universities outside of the UNC System, especially ones with inadequate housing. Rather than overcrowding our current universities, we need to call upon our state officials to start building and better funding other colleges in the state.
Until then, every university that continues to over-admit will have to find a way to manage its massive student body. The only way I can imagine overcoming this is by creating a formal summer semester. It wouldn’t be ideal by any means, especially in the North Carolina heat, but if done right, the University could provide housing for about a third of its student body, and reduce class sizes and on-campus housing scarcity in the fall and spring.
Ultimately, the issue of housing on campus needs to be addressed as a solvable problem and not as something insurmountable. Even if the state government fails us in expanding the university system, there are means to ensure students can live on-campus and complete their degrees. If nothing else, they should at least give us an eviction notice.
