The Pool Is Nice, and So Are the Bigger Beds. But Hotel Living Is ‘Ludicrous’ for College Students.
By Liam KnoxAugust 6, 2019
The Inn at Virginia Tech is one of two hotels the university is leasing to house surplus students this year.Virginia Tech
Just imagine: You’re about to begin your freshman year of college. You’re nervous, but excited. Then, you’re told that the college doesn’t have enough on-campus housing to accommodate every incoming student. Instead of getting the traditional dorm experience, you’ll be staying in a hotel.
That’s what’s happening at Virginia Tech, which announced that it had enrolled 1,000 students more than it planned for this fall. Ultimately, the university decided to lease rooms in a nearby Holiday Inn Express, in addition to placing some in the university-owned Inn at Virginia Tech.
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The Inn at Virginia Tech is one of two hotels the university is leasing to house surplus students this year.Virginia Tech
Just imagine: You’re about to begin your freshman year of college. You’re nervous, but excited. Then, you’re told that the college doesn’t have enough on-campus housing to accommodate every incoming student. Instead of getting the traditional dorm experience, you’ll be staying in a hotel.
That’s what’s happening at Virginia Tech, which announced that it had enrolled 1,000 students more than it planned for this fall. Ultimately, the university decided to lease rooms in a nearby Holiday Inn Express, in addition to placing some in the university-owned Inn at Virginia Tech.
You can’t just start accepting kids that you don’t have beds for. It’s a little bit greedy.
While the number of unanticipated students is unusually high, Virginia Tech’s solution is no anomaly. In the last few decades, dozens of colleges have had to place students in hotel rooms, including James Madison, New York, Northeastern, and San Jose State Universities, and the Universities of Pittsburgh and Southern California, to name a few.
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So, what’s it like to spend a semester or two in the hotel Cali-dorm-ia? In some ways, it’s not all that different from living in a dorm — resident assistants are still around to keep the partying to a minimum, and community-building events are still held. But in other ways the differences, both positive and negative, can be significant. Students who spoke to The Chronicle about their experiences living in hotel overflow housing said they enjoyed the free continental breakfasts and nicer rooms, but many also said they felt isolated and disconnected from campus life.
The Suite Life
Jess DeBakey got the news shortly before starting her first year at the Johns Hopkins University, in 2009. When she learned that she would be living at the nearby Hopkins Inn, she was nervous. She said the inn’s facilities were old and she was concerned that it would get in the way of her freshman experience.
“My first impressions were, you know, questionable,” she said. “And my parents were not that excited about the setup.”
DeBakey also said that, while the Inn wasn’t too far from her classes or other dorms, she did feel removed from the typical freshman experience. But she and her hotel-mates made the best of it, bonding over their shared inconvenience and reveling in the perks that came with hotel living, like a weekly cleaning service and private bathrooms.
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“There was definitely a bond from Day 1 amongst the people living in the Inn, kind of like, Oh, we’re the outcasts,” she said. “We had to be creative and make our own solutions to some of the oddities of living in a hotel.”
Daniel Strauss, a recent graduate of Syracuse University, said he had few complaints about the year he spent in the Sheraton Syracuse University Hotel, within walking distance of the New York university’s business college, where most of his classes were. Strauss said that some of the benefits included a weekly cleaning service, a full-size bed, and continental breakfast. He even once had a celebrity sighting when he spotted the comedian Mike Epps returning to his room after a set in town.
“It made you feel like you were living in a luxurious place,” he said. “For a lot of people at Syracuse, it was almost a preferable choice.”
Madison Harrington stayed in a hotel her sophomore year at Roger Williams University, in Rhode Island, and she had a similar take on the experience. She chose to live at Baypoint, which the university now promotes as combining “hotel-style living with the experience of university housing.” With a queen-size bed and a “massive” room, Harrington has no regrets.
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The same can’t be said for Mark Boyle, a recent graduate of Sacred Heart University, in Connecticut, who was a residential-success adviser at the Trumbull Marriott Shelton, one town over and about a 15-minute drive from the Fairfield campus. He said that while his experience had its upsides, it was often frustrating and inconvenient. He also had trouble engaging the underclassmen who were assigned there.
Boyle said he had to deal with annoyed Marriott employees, awkward interactions with hotel guests, and frustrated students who felt disconnected from campus life. He had a car to help him get to class, but students who didn’t have one had to take a shuttle to the campus every morning, which Boyle said left them with little freedom to travel back and forth. And the indoor pool and hot tub couldn’t make up for the feelings of isolation, he said.
Sacred Heart officials “would sell it like, Oh, look at this great thing. You guys have a hot tub, you have a pool, you’re living out of this great hotel. That isn’t what a hotel is meant to be,” Boyle said. “A hotel is meant to be lived in for a weekend. You’re not supposed to actually live at a hotel.”
Strauss, despite enjoying his stay at the Sheraton at Syracuse, also acknowledged that the experience was markedly different from a traditional residential hall.
“It’s just a ludicrous experience living in a hotel for two semesters,” he said.
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A spokesman for Virginia Tech told The Chronicle that the university was doing everything it could to ensure that students in the hotels would have a traditional first-year housing experience. He said that the Holiday Inn Express, every room of which will house students during the coming academic year, is located a fifth of a mile from the campus, and that students can expect their rooms to be fitted with the same extralong twin beds and furniture that every other freshman dorm room has.
A Common Solution to a Growing Problem
Virginia Tech’s incoming class is hardly the first to check into a hotel lobby instead of a traditional dorm, and if history is any indicator, it probably won’t be the last.
Nanci Tessier, senior vice president at the Art & Science Group, a higher-education consulting firm, said that colleges turn to hotels for overflow housing because they’re often the only short-term option available in the three-month window between when students put down their deposits and move-in day.
Oftentimes, even with very sophisticated modeling, it’s hard to know who’s going to show up.
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“If you had a point where you were overenrolled on May 1, and you’ve got to be able to accommodate those students in August, there are very few places to turn to except hotels,” she said.
The arrangement also gives universities some financial flexibility. “You may not be making money on it from a housing-revenue point of view,” she said, “but rarely are you losing large amounts of money, and you’re not making the long-term commitment.”
Some universities have made the hotel experience a semipermanent option for student housing. Johns Hopkins continued to lease the Hopkins Inn for seven more years after DeBakey was assigned there; Sacred Heart will house students at the Marriott again in the fall, this time due to dorm construction; James Madison University actually purchased the Howard Johnson hotel it used for overflow housing in the 1990s, and renamed it Rockingham Hall; and Syracuse has rented out rooms in the Sheraton off and on since initially overenrolling, in the early 2000s.
Some students who’ve lived in hotels see the phenomenon as a case of misplaced priorities. Boyle, the Sacred Heart residential adviser who lived at the Marriott, speculated that it was a result of universities’ incentive to expand every year, hedging their bets to ensure growth despite the risks.
“You can’t just start accepting kids that you don’t have beds for,” Boyle said. “It’s a little bit greedy.”
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But David Strauss, also of the Art & Science Group, said the reality isn’t that simple. Strauss, who is not related to Daniel Strauss, said that enrollment rates are growing more unpredictable, and that once-sound methods of projecting enrollment from acceptances don’t work as well as they used to.
“The marketplace of prospective students for colleges and universities is increasingly volatile, and it has reached the point of being extremely volatile,” he said. “Oftentimes, even with very sophisticated modeling, it’s hard to know who’s going to show up.”