Colleges face increased demand for campus housing

The letter to returning Adelphi University students sounded like a sweepstakes offer: Save $2,000 on your college bill this year.

The catch? You have to give up your dorm room.

The deal, a first this year, reflects a spike being seen on Long Island and nationwide in the number of students who want to live on campus and the increasingly creative ways that schools are trying to meet the demand.

At Stony Brook University, for example, demand for housing among incoming freshmen has shot up to 92.8 percent this fall, compared to 73.4 percent just four years ago.

At Hofstra University, about 80 percent of this fall's freshmen will be living on campus, compared to 73 percent in 2005.

Officials say a variety of forces is driving the trend: rising enrollment, more students seeking a traditional college experience and larger numbers of students from outside the region who need to live on campus.

Those factors, coupled with more and more upperclassmen staying on campus, has led to longer waiting lists, more triple rooms and incentives like the one pitched by Adelphi to help ease the crunch, officials say.

"Energy costs have gone up, the cost of commuting has gone up, so it's not such a bargain to be living off-campus anymore," said Esther Goodcuff, associate vice president for enrollment management and student affairs at Adelphi.

Although at Adelphi the percentage of freshmen asking for dorm space has remained fairly constant at about 48 percent, freshmen enrollment at the university has jumped from 770 in 2004 to 900 this fall. During the same period, the number of returning students applying for campus housing has risen from 644 to 697. The school, with a full-time graduate and undergraduate enrollment of about 5,200, has only 542 dorm rooms.

Biggest incentive so far

Smaller, more targeted housing incentives have been offered before, but this year's incentive is the largest ever offered at the school. So far, three or four of those students have taken the university up on its offer to reduce their total bill by $1,000 each semester if they agree to leave the dorms.

"They're having a good experience and they don't want to leave," Goodcuff said. "And they understand that the supply is not meeting the demand. They don't want to give up their beds because they're afraid they won't ever get them back."

At Stony Brook, tripling up freshmen -- a practice in use for more than a decade -- has become routine, so much so that the school two years ago began showing a demo of how a double room is furnished for triples as part of freshman orientation. The arrangement has also prompted a color-coding system in which the university slaps stickers on furniture to recommend how students in triple rooms can equitably divide up space.

For example: The student who takes the top bunk gets his own desktop, while the other two roommates (who have a single bed and a bottom bunk, which are considered more desirable) share a desktop. Some schools, such as Binghamton University -- which projects 25 percent of this year's incoming class, about 680 students, will come from Long Island -- guarantee dorms for all freshmen. But the school singles out those students who end up in triples for special treatment including a catered dinner and gift bags.

This year, virtually all of the incoming freshmen at Stony Brook who will be living in dormitories will be assigned to a triple for at least one semester, said Dallas W. Bauman III, assistant vice president for campus residences. Adding to the crunch, 5,670 returning students also will be living on campus this fall, 350 more than in 2007. Just under 500 continuing students have been put on a waiting list for campus housing. Stony Brook's total undergraduate enrollment is about 15,000.

"It's not every freshman, but it's pretty close," Bauman said of the tripling. "Clearly, there's a perception that the on-campus experience adds value to the college experience."

8,900 beds at Stony Brook

The university has added 851 beds since 2004 and another 600 are slated to be ready by 2010, bringing the total number of beds to about 8,900. Those new rooms are expected to end the need for triples, he said. Even so, Stony Brook says that more than 15 percent of students in triple rooms opt to remain in them when offered a chance for a double room.

Among them was Erin Mallare, 19, of Queens, now a junior majoring in health sciences.

"I was a little anxious about it at first," she said of being tripled up her freshmen year. "But surprisingly, I had a really good experience," she said. "It's not permanent. It's just a part of life."

Andrew Cheng, 22, of Brooklyn graduated in May with a degree in clinical laboratory science, and he said the campus experience was paramount, whatever the living arrangement.

"Most of my friends from high school went to commuter schools, and they just kind of go to school and they go to class and they go home," Cheng said. "They still hung out with everyone from high school. They didn't really branch out."

Farmingdale State College has seen a slight uptick in dorm requests, but resident students remain a small fraction of total enrollment, about 500 out of 6,500.

SUNY Old Westbury's incoming freshmen class, at 209 students, remains small enough that no overflow is expected, nor is any crunch projected at Dowling College or the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University in Brookville, officials said.

Molloy College in Rockville Centre, a strictly commuter school, plans to open a 150-bed dormitory in the fall of 2009 to answer an increasing demand from incoming students.

At Hofstra, the opening of a new graduate dormitory that allows the school to use the old graduate housing for underclassmen has offset the increase in the demand from freshman for campus housing without having any triple rooms.

Hofstra officials attribute much of the increase in freshmen seeking housing to its aggressive national recruiting campaign. A few years ago, about a third of the school's students came from out of state. Today, half do.

Also, the school has worked to make dorm living more attractive to first-year students, creating theme-based housing clusters for freshmen, said Sandra Johnson, vice president of student affairs. So far, there's an arts-interest dorm and a civic engagement house, for students interested in volunteering.

"Students are coming to school looking to be engaged both inside and outside the classroom," Johnson said. "It's part of their decision-making process in choosing a college.

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