By Nick Masercola, Contributing Writer
It’s no secret that the University is losing money. One only needs to listen to the crickets chirping in the residence halls to know retention is down and the amount of students living in on-campus housing is dwindling. The University needs people living on-campus so that the University can continue to run without budget cuts and are putting in all sorts of new ideas to try to keep people here. The problem is that none of these ideas actually change anything. They only hide the fundamental problems with our housing to the public, while still offering residents little incentive to stay.
One of the University’s biggest issues is simply the way our housing system works. At most other colleges, students spend their freshman year in one of the worst dorms and slowly work their way up to the nicest. Here, freshman residence halls are the nicest and then going down in quality the longer you’re here. If I know the place I live is going to stay expensive, yet get crappier every year, why shouldn’t I head off-campus? It makes no sense to stay in the residence halls, and this is the major flaw the University created when it made the best areas “freshman only.”
That’s just the beginning. Now there is ” theme housing,” where a group of people with common interests can petition to all live on the same floor. Sounds good on paper, but in practice, the flimsy rules as to what a theme can be (you could make an entire floor in Nassau/Suffolk shoe-themed, if you wanted to) and the incredibly poor advertising (most people don’t know what “theme housing” is) have combined to create a near non-existent level of interest, evidenced by the fact that the application due date has been pushed back several times. This is a cheap ploy to get more people—predominantly Greek Life—back in the residence halls, but I’m not sure even they would be that interested in this vain attempt.
Point blank: The University only makes changes that make them appear better and not ones that actually make them become better. For instance, the televisions in the Student Center that show the menus look good to people who visit, but do they actually help? No. Most of the time, the displayed menu is wrong anyway. Did students ask for a re-vamp of the gym to occur in the middle of the semester, stopping many people from actually going? No, but it makes the University seem like it’s constantly improving itself.
Furthermore, the real reason the nicest areas are freshman only? To trick residents into thinking the campus is better than it actually is–that’s the real problem. The school refuses to make changes that truly benefit the people living here. From the shortened food service hours on weekends (shouldn’t the people who pay to stay here get better service than those who don’t?), to the lack of fun things to do on-campus during the weekend, which is why so many people simply head out to Dizzy’s or the city. The University’s problem with keeping people on-campus is that, quite frankly, there isn’t much to offer. And instead of fixing the problem and giving residents more bang for their buck, they merely act as magicians, using smoke and mirrors to hide the campuses flaws until the students finally walk into their rooms.
