Travel back to Tuesday, April 1 and replay the scene: hoards of eager students waiting in line in the residence life office to pick a lottery number for housing for the 2003-04 academic school year. They pull out their number and start anticipating which dormitory they will call home for the next year.
Fast forward two days to Thursday night, when over 200 freshmen and sophomores are packed into the food court to pick their living spaces for next year. For the current sophomores, the usual set-up is Houses Three through Seven. For the current freshman, the set-up is New Residence Hall and Houses One and Two. Neither scenario happened on Thursday.
Because of an overflow of students, the housing is backed-up. Some current sophomores will be confined to New Residence Hall next year and current freshmen are still on the wait-list for upperclass housing.
As the college continues to grow academically and athletically, it is searching for more new students to bring to the campus. The surplus of students can be attributed to one thing-the acceptance of too many applicants to Cabrini.
Cabrini is a tuition-driven school-the tuition of its students helps finance the college in more ways than one. It is only natural to bring in more money, so the instinct of the college is to bring in more people.
But recently, the college has been accepting too many people than it can house. Take the 2001-02 academic school year, where Grace Hall was turned into a dormitory for the incoming freshmen then. This forced the faculty that had offices in Grace Hall to be pushed out and in turn, they had to find offices elsewhere on campus.
The building of the New Residence Hall was a much-needed addition to the campus and it gave back the rooms in Grace Hall to the faculty. But, two years later, the college is facing the same problem with housing-what is to be done with the flood of students?
This year’s lottery should serve as a wake-up call to the college-there comes a time when it has to shut the door on some applicants, or they may have to start housing students at Rosemont again.
Posted to the web by Matthew Cavalier
