The housing selection process for the 2026-27 academic year is following a delayed timeline compared to the last academic year.
The co-op, double, and general room selection applications will now simultaneously open in late February and close in early March. According to Director of Housing Heather McCarthy, the housing process is delayed so that students can apply to their next year’s housing after they choose to apply for study away.
The former timeline caused issues because students applied for housing before applying to study away. This created confusion for Housing when many of the students who initially applied for housing later decided to be off-campus, McCarthy said.
Last academic year, the application and lottery for co-ops — residences where seniors live in small groups — occurred in October, and the application for the general housing lottery closed in January, McCarthy said. The general lottery occurred in April, during which groups of students selected their housing based on their assigned pick number, which is dependent on the group’s average housing points.
The deadline to apply to study away, however, was not until March. Students who had yet to decide if they wanted to study away still had to meet the October or January deadline for housing.
Housing then had to tell the students who decided to study away that they needed to give up their housing. “There would be a lot of communications of, ‘Well we see you’ve applied for study away, it means you have to give up your housing because you’ve put your interest in [studying away],’” McCarthy said. “It made it hard to understand who was doing what.”
This year, the housing application will close two days after the March 1 study away deadline, providing all students who decide to not study away a chance to apply for on-campus housing. The new timeline will prevent students from initially signing up for housing at the College and then deciding to study away, McCarthy said.
However, many students expressed confusion and frustration with the lack of clarification about the new process. “We got no communication that the co-op lottery was not happening in the fall, so everyone made a bunch of housing plans only for the emails to never come,” Lindsay Gadsden ’27 told the Record. “We still aren’t sure how the co-op lottery is going to work now that it’s in the spring.”
McCarthy said that the new timeline, with no deadlines in January, also better accounts for Winter Study’s impact on students. “[Over Winter Study], many [students] are traveling,” she said. “Many of them are off snowboarding all day and not paying attention to their computers. We fully acknowledge that Winter Study is different for every single student, and we don’t want that to be a draw on a student’s access to housing.”
The new deadline allows students to take full advantage of Winter Study without having to think about housing for the following year.
The new process also condenses all housing applications, which means that students who do not receive co-op housing are no longer required to submit a second application, according to McCarthy.
This year, after the housing application closes, the room selection process will start in late March and end in early April, McCarthy said. However, she emphasized that the timeline may not be the same in future years. “It’s never permanent,” she said. “We’re constantly working to find the right fit.”
