Posted: 04/18/07

Bedless students
54 students turned away at end of room lottery

Jon Ketchum | contributing writer
jketchum@smcvt.edu

Every spring the St. Michael's College student body floods Alliot Student Center to select rooms for the upcoming school year. From lowest to highest, students form a line according to the numbers printed on their orange lottery cards. Lounging against walls, the crowd chats to one another while the line slowly shrinks. Minutes turn into hours and anxiety builds. To calm the crowd’s nerves, staff members shout occupancy updates across the room. In the end, some students don’t get the rooms they had wanted, but everyone always leaves knowing they will have a bed in the fall; that is, until now.

This year at least 54 students were left without housing at the end of the room lottery session for rising sophomores. (Jon Ketchum, photo)

This year, the room lottery ended with 54 rising sophomores without beds for the fall.

Room lottery logistics

According to Sheryl Fleury, the housing coordinator at St. Michael’s College, room lottery directly depends on the number of students accepted into the college in a given year. About every three years the school tries to maximize enrollment when it has available space. As a result at the end of those three years there is a housing crunch. To remedy the situation the school then limits acceptance the next two years, Fleury says.

“It’s like a rollercoaster,” Fleury says. “There are going to be years when there is a huge waitlist and then there are going to be years with no waitlist at all.”

Fleury says there are a few things the school has done in the past to ensure the advertised 100 percent on-campus housing policy.

Lounges have been built up and equipped with the necessary dorm room furniture, double rooms have been turned into triples, and in the early 80s some students were put up in the Days Inn across the street from campus.

However, Fleury says that usually everyone eventually gets a room.

“You have to think of housing like the airline business,” Fleury says. “We intentionally over-book students so that our ‘plane’ will still be full after a two percent cancellation rate."

Students speak out

Fleury estimates that about three quarters of students were satisfied with the room lottery this year. However, one of the students left bedless, first-year Korinne Baccali, says she is not happy with her current situation.

“When I first came to this school I didn’t think housing would be an issue,” she says. “But after waiting in line for two hours the only thing that I could sign up for was a wait list.”

Ideal housing for Baccali would have been to live in the recently constructed suites, she says. Now with a lottery number of 1343, she is on a wait list, not knowing where she will live until July.

“This is something that I shouldn’t be worried about at the end of the year,” Baccali says. “I just hate not knowing where I am going to live next year.”

Although Baccali loves the sense of community that the residential college provides, she doesn’t believe that the school should advertise guaranteed housing if they don’t have anywhere to put every student.

“I think that this is an administration problem,” she says. “It seems simple you can’t accept more students then you can house.”

Sophomore Matt Irons received housing this year but was not happy with his options. As a rising junior his options for rooms were limited; only dorms were available. When Irons’ father, Mike Irons, heard that his son would be living in a dorm next year, he says he was disappointed.

“I truly believe that the school has a great policy in providing a residential community atmosphere for its students,” he says. “However I believe that the school should provide adequate housing, especially among upperclassmen.”

Need for growth?

According to Vice President of Admission and Enrollment Management Jerry Flanagan, St. Michael’s set a goal several years ago to reach 3,500 applicants by the year 2010. This year the college obtained that goal.

“There are a lot of good things that have happened at St. Michael’s over the past few years,” Flanagan says. “We have quality faculty members and students and our reputation has risen as a result of that.”

Flanagan says the rise in applicants will continually affect each year’s selection process, however.

“It is becoming more and more challenging to determine just how many students to accept,” he says. “We are trying to keep enrollment stable, but still have enough housing for everyone.”

In the past, when housing has been overcrowded, students have been put in the Days Inn across the street from main campus and next to Purple Knights. Fleury says she doesn't expect this to happen this year. (Jon Ketchum, photo)

According to Flanagan, the school is now 200 students over the target amount of 1,800. To Flanagan the surplus directly affects the quality of housing received by current students.

With the number of applicants steadily increasing each year, students like Baccali feel that the school needs to expand in order to accommodate the needs of the growing college. Baccali’s remedy to the situation is to allow seniors to live off campus, opening up more housing for all students.

According to Fleury, however, there are certain restrictions that do not allow the school to utilize these plans of action. Room and board affects revenue too heavily to let students live off campus or expand at this time, she says.

Donna Ellison, administrative assistant of special gifts for the Institutional Advancement office, was willing to speak more on the issue.

“Currently we do not have the endowment to expand,” she says. “There are too many things such as repairs that are more critical at this time.”

According to Ellison there are approximately 70 million dollars saved in the college’s endowment at this time. Ellison says that St. Michael’s can only spend four and a half percent of the fund each year. Maintenance costs and financial aid usually occupy the year’s spending quota, she says.

For now the school will continue riding the “wait list rollercoaster.” The 54 bedless students will continue waiting for housing and Fleury will continue working to diminish the waitlist.

Although room service may be a perk for some, Fleury says that it is unlikely that the school will have to resort to housing anyone across the street in the fall.

“The admissions office is swearing that they are making the class of 2011 small,” she says. “If they do, every student will find a bed.”