The College has formed the First-Year Housing Working Group, chaired by Senior Associate Dean of Campus Life Doug Schiazza, to evaluate changes to the College’s first-year housing system for the 2025-2026 academic year, President of the College Maud S. Mandel announced in an all-campus email last Monday.
The working group — composed of seven staff members and four students, who were chosen from self-nominations through the Student Faculty Committee Board — will convene throughout the fall to address strain on the housing system in the wake of increasingly large first-year classes in recent years. The group will consider converting upperclass student housing in Currier Quad and Central Campus into permanent first-year housing and revert Mission Park to upperclass housing. It will finalize its recommendations by November.
Both the Classes of 2025 and 2026 enrolled more students than could be housed in Sage Hall, Williams Hall, and Mission Park, which have been first-year housing since 2006, according to Schiazza. As a result, the Office of Campus Life (OCL) reserved buildings traditionally for upperclass students as “overflow housing” for first-years: Lehman Hall for the Class of 2025 and Tyler Annex for the Class of 2026.
OCL also reserved Lehman and Fitch for the Classes of 2027 and 2028, respectively, but returned both to upperclass students in the August housing lottery after it confirmed the classes did not require additional housing.
Because the size of the incoming first-year class is finalized in early May, overflow housing must be withheld from the housing lottery, which traditionally occurs earlier in the spring.
“The reality is, the buildings that we have designated for first-year housing right now won’t accommodate,” Schiazza told the Record. He noted the inflexibility of rooms in Mission, the vast majority of which must remain singles because of their square footage. Only 16 of Mission’s 320 rooms are designated as either doubles or flex rooms, which can be occupied by either one or two students.
To address the issue, the working group will consider converting Fayerweather, Fitch, Currier House, and East and West Colleges into first-year housing and designating Mission for upperclass students, Schiazza said.
These potential changes aim to build flexibility to house first-year classes of varying sizes by including buildings that have flex rooms and introducing more doubles into first-year housing, Schiazza said.
He also noted that the working group may consider renovating existing buildings or constructing new buildings but added that these solutions would be unlikely to ameliorate the problem in the short term. “It’s going to be a long process,” he said, adding that any new construction would likely occur after the completion of a new building to house the College’s art museum in 2027.
Schiazza also said he was aware of concerns about dispersing first-year students across campus. “The trick will be finding a way to create community in these other spaces,” he said. “You have to think through the unintended consequences of something like this as well, and I’m hoping this group will be able to do that.”
