Students Are Outraged About On Campus Housing

As the 2021-2022 school year comes to a close, students are required to select housing for the following year. This can be a stressful time for students as they often do not get their first option or even their back up option. 

Point Loma Nazarene University is growing in population as larger freshman classes are admitted, but this causes current on-campus students to worry about where they will live the following semester.

Many students have been affected by this and are now looking for off campus apartments. Second-year education major, Paige Brakebill, is frustrated that she has to find an off campus apartment due to the limited space in her desired dorm building.

“I’m planning to live off campus in an apartment but my original plan was to live in Flex, but unfortunately my group didn’t get it even with our selection time of 8:30 a.m.,” Brakebill said.

The earliest selection times were at 8 a.m. and there were a total of seven apartments available to juniors, only two of which were available for guys.

Brakebill went from being excited to live in Flex because of her early selection time to apartment hunting on the same day.

“Obviously I’m a little upset because I wanted to live in Flex and be on campus. I’m a little confused as to how there were only five rooms for junior girls and two rooms for junior boys. I understand that it is difficult to make room for everyone but that number just seems very low to me out of all the apartments there are in Flex,” Brakebill said.

Brakebill recognizes that not everyone is going to get their first choice, but she does think that there needs to be improvements with the housing system.

“At the end of the day, not everyone is going to be happy with their room selection but I do think that there could be some changes made in order for more students to get housing on campus. ” Brakebill said. 

Second year business marketing major Giuliana Mcgilvray currently lives in Nease Hall. Mcgilvray also planned to live on campus next semester but had to change her plans due to the limited housing space.

“The way college housing has been so difficult has inspired my roommate and I to figure it out on our own. After my last semester, I transferred back to Loma and could not pick housing until winter break making the process very difficult. The complexity of the housing process at Point Loma left me defeated, believing I wasn’t going to have a place to stay for the spring semester,” Mcgilvray said.

Shannon Hutchison Caraveo, director of undergraduate admissions, explained in an email interview with The Point the common practice for universities to accept more students than they can accommodate each school year. 

According to Hutchison Caraveo, colleges in the US have seen a rise in admission as the number of colleges a student applies to rises each year. Since students admitted to PLNU are almost always admitted to other schools too, each school’s opportunity to enroll these admitted students diminishes.
“Every college accepts more students than they can accommodate even for THIS fall, much less two/three years out,” Hutchison Caraveo said. “If we were to only accept the number of students that we have beds on campus, we’d have a freshman class of 100.  Each college tracks yield – that is, the number of admitted students who actually choose to attend the college – and makes admissions decisions based on that.”