Overcrowding Creates Unhappy Students

Overcrowding Creates Unhappy Students

Every high school student’s idea of typical college life involves living in the school’s dorms and eating disgusting food from the cafeteria. What most future college students don’t realize is that usually after the sophomore year of college, many universities do not guarantee housing, leaving students to fend for themselves.

Housing is an issue on almost every university’s campus nationwide at one point or another. There is always a high demand for housing, and an even higher demand for on-campus housing. Many universities offer guaranteed housing to freshmen, but after that it is rare to receive anything better.

To solve this problem universities are attempting to expand their campuses to incorporate more dorms, or are converting other buildings on campus into dorms. Not only is this process expensive for the university, it has also come to involve the local neighborhoods. When the university wants to expand that means the neighborhoods surrounding the school have to accommodate these changes; this has led to feuds between universities and residential neighborhoods around them.

For example Harvard University; which already owns quite a bit of land in Boston, recently decided to expand its campus into Alston and a little into Brighton. In an article in the Boston Globe the residents of Alston and Brighton expressed their concerns about what will happen to the land, and how fast it will happen. Their main concern is that the new developments will increase the cost of living, and there will not be enough affordable housing. This will be an ongoing battle that will likely end with Harvard paying excessive amounts of money to the town to obtain the land.

In an article in the Bos...

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...e numerous complaints.

“We will address this issue quickly and thoroughly,” Phelan said. “We want to be good neighbors.”

According to the Globe article, city officials plan to ask Northeastern to appear before the licensing board, and have also hinted at legal action if the university doesn’t obtain a dorm license for the buildings.

From problems of infestation to not enough rooms, universities around the state are in the same dilemma. Many have found solutions and are in the process of alleviating the problems, while others are still looking for a suitable solution. In the case of Northeastern, they have attacked the issue of over crowding by building numerous new buildings, but have yet to fix those buildings that are slowly deteriorating. Until they do this, they will have to find a way to make the living situation in these buildings a bit more bearable.