The Office of Campus Life (OCL) is modifying the housing accommodations process, beginning with room selection for next academic year. Students with accommodations will choose the room they live in, rather than receive a housing assignment from the Housing Accommodation Review Team (HART). Additionally, students with housing accommodations will no longer be able to “pull in” two other students to live in the same residence hall as part of their accommodation placement.
The changes will allow most students with approved housing accommodations to choose a room that meets their needs in the building of their choice, according to Director of Housing Heather McCarthy. “Students with accommodations will now have the same choice that the rest of our students have to pick where they want to live,” McCarthy wrote in an email to the Record. “Because we have been able to create equivalency between our housing selection processes … we determined that pull-ins were no longer an essential element of the housing accommodations process.”
Some students with accommodations will now select their rooms in the regular housing lottery. Room profiles are being programmed in StarRez, the platform used by the College for students to select housing, so that only the rooms that meet a student’s particular accommodations will be available to them during the housing selection process, according to Associate Vice President for Student Affairs Jeff Malanson.
“Students whose accommodations can be met through participation in the general housing selection process will participate that way (for example, a senior whose only accommodation is for a single room),” Malanson wrote in an email to the Record. “Students whose accommodations likely cannot be met through participation in the general selection process will have a dedicated selection process that occurs before the general process (which is consistent with how we have always done housing accommodations).”
Under the previous system, the Housing Office assigned rooms to students with housing accommodations based on their needs. While they could express building preferences, those requests were not always fulfilled. To help offset that lack of choice, the office allowed students with accommodations to identify up to two peers to “pull in” and be housed in the same residence hall.
The practice was developed in response to student feedback, according to McCarthy. “Offering these students pull-ins was a way to give them some reassurance that they would be able to find community in whatever residence hall they were placed in,” she wrote.
But many students still expressed discontent with the housing system, prompting the policy changes, McCarthy explained. “There has long been dissatisfaction with the many steps involved in the HART process and with the fact that Housing selected students’ rooms for them,” she wrote.
McCarthy also noted the strain the pull-in policy placed on general housing availability as a reason for the shift. “By the time accommodation and pull-in placements were done, a large percentage of upperclass housing was already assigned, leaving students picking in the general room selection process with far fewer options to choose from,” she wrote.
This academic year, 295 students requested housing accommodations, resulting in 174 pull-in placements in upperclassmen housing, according to McCarthy. Of these 295 requests, 224 students accepted their housing accommodation placements, and 70 students were ultimately pulled in.
Under the new policy, students with accommodations will still pick their rooms first, but fewer rooms will be filled during this phase of the housing process. “Without pull-ins, students participating in the general housing selection process will now have many more options to choose from,” McCarthy wrote.
Some accommodations will still require placement by Housing rather than self-selection. “We are still working through all of the specifics of the room profile programming, but we expect that any accommodation involving bathrooms will still require placement by Housing,” Malanson told the Record. “Private and semi-private bathrooms are a scarce resource that needs to be carefully managed.”
House Coordinators and Residential Directors will retain their ability to pull in two other students.
Beyond the accommodations overhaul, McCarthy said that no other major housing policy changes are being implemented this year. “While there are always improvements in progress, the accommodations process will be the most significant change implemented this year,” she wrote. “This has been a long-standing goal, more than four years in the making, to expand access and improve the housing experience for students with accommodations.”
