Students never have liked the system used to assign rooms on campus.
Change is good, but there has been too much change with how students select their rooms. The housing assignment system has changed each of the last three years.
The housing lottery worked well. It only lasted a couple hours, and it seemed students were at least somewhat happy with their choices.
The year after was a little more chaotic as students camped out in front of the housing office all night to get the housing assignments they wanted.
Now a student will have to find a way to either make an appointment they did not have a choice about or put their trust in another student to pick a room for them. Then, next year, the housing draft will move to a completely online system. Click here to learn more about the new processes.
The problem is that officials can’t seem to make up their minds about how housing should be assigned, which confuses students as they decide where to live.
The lottery system worked fine and was pretty unique to this campus as we are smaller than other schools. It was fun for students to hang out with their friends, listen to music, play games, and eat junk food.
Now all the competitiveness and fun was taken out of housing selection and it instead was made more inconvenient by making students take time out of their school day.
At first, it seemed like officials tried to fix something that wasn’t broken. Then, instead of going back to what worked before, officials tried to fix it again with something completely new. Officials need to find a system and stick with it. There is no sense in repeatedly changing something that worked in the past.
Changes such as these can make a simple process confusing and more difficult than necessary.
Perhaps the system next year will be a little better, and officials will decide to keep it.
We appreciate the effort to improve students’ experience registering for housing, but a new system every year is difficult to keep up with. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
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