When Iker Lopez first arrived at the University of Oregon for his freshman year, he couldn’t find his dorm room. He reported this to Global Scholars Hall, but his card listed a lounge and didn’t say which floor.
“Our impression was, it was going to be two doubles connected by a bathroom. That’s what pops up when you look at the rooms and your housing,” Lopez said. “I was the first one to move in, and I took a video of the room, and I sent it to them and then we were all super shocked that it was just one really big room with two bunk beds.”
He had been told he would be in a room with three other students, but didn’t realize his dorm room would be a converted common area with four beds and the windows covered so people walking down the halls couldn’t see in the room.
This year, UO announced their freshman class was the biggest ever recorded at the university: 5,338. According to an Around the O article published in late September, the class represents a 16% increase in freshman enrollment compared to last year and a 36% increase over the last five years.
As a result of this large freshman class, UO has been forced to find more available space for incoming students by converting lounges into dorm rooms and what used to be doubles into triples, according to GSH resident assistant Liam McNamara.
Over-enrollment has created a number of issues within freshman dorms, like students not being able to move rooms and having limited community space and crowded amenities.
Community spaces are now returning to their former use as students are being relocated out of temporary living spaces to new openings where students didn’t show up or have already left. But due to the greater number of triples, amenities are still overworked.
Lounges in dorms like GSH started as temporary living spaces, and the students assigned to these spaces are being relocated to permanent living spaces as they open up, according to an emailed statement by Anna Schmidt-MacKenzie, director of Resident Life and Educational Initiatives. She said this is due to an “overwhelming and somewhat more than expected demand for a University of Oregon education.”
Students living in these temporary living spaces are charged for the cheapest room rate plus their dining plan, Schmidt-MacKenzie said, adding that these students will also receive support from their RAs and other UO team members will help them to transition to permanent living spaces.
However, some students feel like they lack support from the university. Sabina Lyon-Freedman said it was difficult to know where to go on the first day. It didn’t help that she didn’t really know what she was looking for.
“It had lounge written on the temporary housing portal thing, but it was unclear what they meant,” she said. “I thought I was gonna be stuck in a broom closet.”
As spots began to open up, students in lounges were given new room assignments and Lyon-Freedman was assigned to a room down the hall. She was given 48 hours to move.
When she went to look at the room, she found the top bunk she was supposed to sleep on was extremely unstable. Additionally, because of medical reasons, sleeping on a top bunk was unrealistic, she said. Her future roommates were never told she was coming.
When she brought her situation up with University Housing, staff offered to let her stay in her lounge for a couple extra days and suggested that she request that maintenance bring in a new bed. When she asked that housing assign her to a different room on account of her medical needs, they told her she would need to provide doctor’s notes to the Accessible Education Center and then speak with housing again.
“I’m supposed to do all that by Tuesday,” Lyon-Freedman. “I knew I would only be given 48 hours, but I did not know that the place I would be moved to would be inaccessible for me.”
Despite making no headway with the accessibility center, UO housing found her a double with a bathroom that had opened up in Kalapuya Ilihi which fit her needs, Lyon-Freedman said. She moved there on Wednesday.
Just a floor below Lyon-Freedman’s room, the second floor lounge in the north tower of GSH played host to four young men, making it a very rare quad dorm room. Iker Lopez and Shai Bromberg are two of the people who live there and have already grown close over the first month of school, they said.
Now, after establishing connections with the other residents, they and their other two roommates are being sent to four different dorm rooms in three different dorm buildings.
“So one of us is going into Barnhart. [Iker’s] going to Bean, I’m going to Hamilton and another one is going to Hamilton,” Bromberg said.
They will take the spot of students that either never showed up or have left UO. But Lopez and Bromberg would rather stick together.
“I’m moving to Bean and getting put in a double with someone new,” Lopez said. “We actually filled out a roommate change so that me and [Shai] could actually be in a double.”
The four students have now moved in with roommates they don’t know in a hall with people they have never met.
“It’s very frustrating because I made new friends, got close with my roommates and everyone’s comfortable,” Bromberg said. “Now, like mid-term, while I have all these tests and everything now they’re telling us I gotta move, get a new roommate [and] I have to move all my stuff from this location.”
When Megan Sebree signed up for housing in the spring, she registered for a double with a sink. But when she checked her housing portal late in the summer, her room had switched to a triple, she said. The effects of over-enrollment have become a normal part of her living experience.
In the first weeks of school, with lounges being used for temporary living, she and her friends looked for study rooms or remained in their dorms. Sebree said she has spent more time in her dorm room than she had expected.
“I think we’ve been using the study rooms more, but the study rooms are just full all the time.” Sebree said. “And I think I’ve been spending more time in my dorm than I would have probably thought I would.”
In addition to converted lounges and triples in GSH, other halls have also felt the effects of over-enrollment. Kalapuya, which is mostly doubles with bathrooms, has also seen a large number of rooms converted to triples.
The large campus population has changed campus life for the rest of the students outside of dorms as well.
UO dining has struggled to keep up. Unthank Hall was designed with seven dining options, only five of which are ever open, according to McNamara. The already-understaffed UO dining appears to be struggling to keep up with the demand of more than 5,000 freshmen, plus RAs, professors and other students. Mcnamara regularly sees lines circling around the Unthank dining hall.
While the lounges have cleared out and students have been moved to permanent living situations, the other effects of this year’s abnormally large freshman class are still being felt and won’t go away so easily.
Over the last few years, UO freshman class sizes have increased steadily. With the construction of new dorms, perhaps there will be enough space for bigger freshmen classes, but it remains to be seen if the rest of campus is prepared for more students.