Back in February, I, along with many other returning students, applied to live on campus next year. With off-campus housing seeming to get increasingly more expensive each year, a big reason for my decision was affordability. However, I didn’t anticipate the difficulty of finding on-campus housing and how quickly good options would run out.

According to Katrina Pawvluk, University Housing director of administration and occupancy management, I wasn’t the only one with this problem. A total of 4,262 returning undergraduate and graduate students applied to live on-campus for the 2022-23 academic year, a number that was surprisingly higher than in past years. However, only a little over half of those students were actually accepted and allowed to select rooms. 

A big reason for this was the lack of space in apartment-style buildings, the most popular option for returning students looking to live on campus. 

“As you get a little bit older, you want a more independent-living environment,” Pawvluk said. “But again, they are the first things to go. Honestly, we were even surprised this year at how quickly the apartments filled up because it happened fast.”

Students who initially wanted to live in on-campus apartments were left to scramble for alternatives. Speaking with a lot of my friends, it was difficult to even find one person whose housing plans turned out exactly the way they wanted. This issue makes it clear that a change needs to be made — NC State needs better housing for returning students. I propose two possible solutions.

First, the University can allocate more space for returning students by modifying the first-year on-campus living requirement. NC State cites a decades-long study on the benefits of freshmen living on campus. However, with more and more new students accepted each year, returning students are getting pushed to the sidelines when it comes to housing. 

Just last year, a record number of 5,030 new students were admitted. Pawvluk said this number is only expected to increase for next year. In turn, housing has to set aside more rooms for new students.

The first-year on-campus living requirement also overlooks affordability as a key factor in deciding where to live. There are plenty of returning students who want to live on campus because it’s the cheapest option for them. On the flip side, some freshmen would benefit more from commuting than paying the high price of housing and a meal plan. 

Financial decisions vary from person to person so it should be up to the student to decide what’s best for them. Housing can still prioritize freshmen by holding some spaces for them, but taking away the requirement would mean more room for returning students. 

Secondly, NC State should build more on-campus apartments to accommodate the high demand.

Pawvluk noted that some residence halls, particularly Avent Ferry Complex, took longer to get selected, most likely because they were all double occupancy. To try and give students more desirable choices, housing switched some floors to singles, resulting in rooms in those floors being readily selected by students. 

While I agree switching more residence halls from doubles to singles would give more returning students better options for living on campus while making better use of residence halls, it also means there is less room in each building. A more comprehensive plan would be a combination of switching some residence hall floors to singles while simultaneously building more on-campus apartments available for students.

For even more flexibility, the application could also be updated to allow students to apply for rooms without a predetermined roommate group. Right now, the application only allows students to apply for certain rooms if they have a roommate group that can fill the room. While this helps students who have people they want to live with, it disadvantages students who want to live in certain rooms but just don’t have the right number of roommates.

To ease the application process, a certain number of hall and suite-style rooms could be held for those applying with a full group and then the rest could be open to people of varying group size who don’t mind randomized roommates. That way, students who weren’t able to find a solid group can still get into suite and apartment-style rooms if they want.

Long story short, NC State needs to do better in prioritizing returning students in the housing process. By modifying the first-year on-campus living requirement and building more apartments, NC State can allow more students to enjoy the benefits of on-campus housing.