While the late summer calls seemed random to students, Director of Housing and Residential Education Allan Blattner said that the recent changes in housing were all part of the plan.
“A couple of years ago we had significant vacancies, so we needed to do something to improve the quality of life on campus,” Blattner said.
Housing decided, based on student data, to begin reassigning certain residential halls to incoming first years and turn previously first-year-only halls into non-first-year halls. The buildings in Olde Campus Lower Quad became first- year residences while Hardin and Craige North became mixed class residences.
Rick Bradley, the associate director of housing, said these changes were based on student response.
“It had been requested through our data that upperclassmen have larger rooms," Bradley said. "Both of those buildings have those larger rooms."
The adjustments and housing assignments were finalized, until the admissions office informed Housing that the University was receiving a higher number of first-years than expected.
“Admissions let us know that our yield was higher, so we had about 150 additional students we needed to house between us and Granville,” Bradley said.
This shock to the system meant that Housing now had to find more rooms after assignments had been completed. Blattner said his team had to scramble to figure out what to do with the surplus of students.
The solution required asking students in Cobb and Craige North to move into different rooms in the same residence or to a different building. Craige North had previously been a first-year residence hall, but because housing added non-first-years to the hall earlier in the summer, the surplus of incoming first-years had nowhere to go.
Blattner said that they could've just placed first-years in any available vacancy, but they wanted to keep the first-years together.
“We have found the more successful approach here is to move the upper-class students to create blocks of first-year space," Blattner said.
