Despite housing unavailability at universities across southern Louisiana, no student at Nicholls was denied a bed.
While 1,125 students could potentially live in residence halls on campus, only 997 students are currently living in the residence halls. Although every student may not have gotten what he or she wanted, and some were denied personal rooms, everyone in need was accommodated in some way.
One hundred twenty-eight beds are unoccupied and available for students right now, and when La Masion du Bayou, the new privatized housing project, is completed in the spring, the number of available beds will increase by 400. There are no immediate plans to construct any new residential halls or to add on to the current ones.
“I believe we actually came out a little better than some of the other schools,” Gray Bekurs, director of residential services, said.
Fifty students were on waiting lists recently at Tulane University because its 3,500-student capacity in its15 residence halls was completely full. Some students had to be given makeshift rooms in the dormitory lounge with sheets of paper taped over the windows to separate the lobby and the converted lounge. Two 270-bed residence halls are to be built in the next few years — a $50 million effort to improve student housing at Tulane.
The University of New Orleans is now considering adding another residence hall to its approximately 1,600-bed capacity because of its recent strains to accommodate students.
Louisiana State University delayed demolition plans for one of its residence halls because of requests for campus housing after all 5,407 beds in the 19 residence halls were filled.
Southern University in Baton Rouge had about 25 students waiting for rooms because of the full occupancy of the approximate 3,000 beds on the campus. Southern University is also currently building new residence halls to replace aging buildings that will be removed.
Loyola, on the other hand, filled 97 percent of its capacity. This positive outcome was made possible because of the opening of the last hall in 1999, which proved to be a critical task in keeping pace with the growing housing demand.
Like Loyola, Xavier University had plenty of room to accommodate all its students. While a new seven-story, 500-bed residence hall nears completion, 12 percent of the available beds remain unoccupied this semester.
Nicholls did not experience some of the extensive problems faced by other universities in South Louisiana this year. Higher admissions requirements and standards may also play a role in the number of beds occupied at Nicholls in the future.
“In 2005, the criteria for admission into the university are changing. They will be more selective, which may have an impact on the number of students coming in, which obviously would then have impact on housing occupancy as well if we have fewer students coming in,” Bekurs said.
Bekurs speculates that if in the future the number of students needing beds exceeded the number available, Nicholls might have to deal with this problem in a way similar to the way other local universities have dealt with this crisis.
“You’d probably see some of the things the other schools have done. We would take study room furniture out of the study rooms and house students temporarily in there. We’d fill out everywhere we could,” Bekurs said. “We don’t want to turn students away; we don’t want them to not have an opportunity to go to school just because they don’t have somewhere to sleep. We want to make sure they are taken care of. After that we might have to look at releasing some people from the residency requirements, some of the upperclassmen that are still bound by their requirements, and see if they might want to be released so that we could get the new students in.”