Photo by Kendall Bulkiwicz | The Crow’s Nest
By Riley Benson
On Feb. 19, the University of South Florida St. Petersburg (USFSP) began its room selection process for students to choose their on-campus dorms for the 2024-25 school year.
For those unfamiliar with the way on-campus housing at USFSP works, in the past, this has been a seamless process. For the span of about a week, students participate in an in-person “room draft,” and for at least the past two years, this draft has taken place in the Osprey multipurpose room.
Typically, the first day is dedicated to students who want to stay in their current room, then the rest of the week allows people to go in and get themselves, and any roommates, assigned to a room of their choosing.
Personally, myself and the people I’m closest to, have not had any issues with the way the housing draft has been done before. I felt that it has always prioritized returning students and upperclassman, and made the process of getting the rooms you wanted easy and accessible for everyone.
However, in the past year on-campus housing has slowly become a lot more of a fight between students.
When I started at USFSP in the fall of 2021, we were still in the midst of pandemic, wearing masks to class and social distancing in the dining hall. There were a lot of vacancies on-campus at the time, and if you needed a room switch leading up to the fall 2021 semester, housing easily made the change for you.
This year, at the start of the fall 2023 semester, USF President Rhea Law, sent out a school-wide email about the estimated 7,400 students that are planned to live on-campus, across both the Tampa and St. Petersburg dorms. All on-campus housing was expected to be filled to the maximum capacity.
For many students, on-campus housing is their only option, as finding a place off campus is outside their budget and hard to find. The option to live on-campus for all four years is extremely valuable.
Despite the ease of the room selection process of past years , this year the process changed.
While on Nov. 25, 2023, USFSP Housing sent out its standard email about how applications for the 2024-25 year were now open, it wasn’t until two emails later sent out on Jan. 17 that students were informed that there would be a change in the process.
The first email that was sent out contained incorrect information, including wrong dates for room selections, and a corrected email wasn’t sent out until over an hour later. Regardless, students were notified that the room selection was now going to be taking place virtually on the USFSP housing portal site, between Feb. 19 and 23.
At first glance there didn’t seem to be much of an issue with the initial email sent out. Housing formally announced that room selections would take place Feb. 19 to Feb. 23, and that student’s needed to complete their housing application and pay the $50 application fee.
However, trouble didn’t arise until about a month later, on Feb. 15, when housing finally sent out an email that included the exact timeslots that students were going to be able to pick their rooms. The email contained dates and times throughout the room selction week, that varied from student to student, that allowed someone to go online to pick their rooms. The email I received, is when I first started seeing red flags and began worrying about the housing draft.
I was assigned Feb. 26 at 11 a.m. Now, if you recall, the housing office had initially stated that the housing draft would only last until Feb. 23. I had also submitted my housing application back in November, and had completed all the necessary steps to be assigned a room, so I was confused as to why I was assigned so late.
Now, I did not pay the $50 housing application fee until Feb. 9 because I was under the assumption that paying the application fee and how soon we pay it, would not affect our room selection. In fact, the past few years, students did not have to pay the application fee to participate in the room selections.
I decided to email housing about why I was assigned a date so late into the process considering I submitted my application months ago, completed it on time and am a senior student. A close friend of mine, also emailed housing because they, similar to me, completed the application months ago, and was assigned the same date, but at 10:30 a.m.
Housing then sent out a standard copy/paste response stating, “Each time slot was designed specifically to consider a multitude of factors, including but not limited to the application received date, the application completed date, the application fee paid date, and the roommate group size.” It also clarified later that the draft was extended to Feb. 29 to accommodate an increased amount of returning students.
This response caused me to look further into the “multitude of factors,” finding out that it really wasn’t the time the application was sent, it was roommate group sizes that dictated the room selections. From Feb. 19 to 21, only roommate group sizes of 3-6 people could pick rooms, then from 20 to 22, groups of 2 would pick, then finally solo students and anyone left over would pick from 23 to 29.
Although solo students are now picking later, this fact did not make me feel any safer. As mentioned, housing on-campus is extremely competitive. I knew there was a high chance that a single room was not going to be available.
When the day of the housing selection finally began, I watched as literal madness descended upon my floor group chat for my dorm building. Not only did a lot of people realize that they had to file their housing application, but many people were very upset with the new process. There were groups of people who had been living in same room for two to three years now and because of the new system, were forced into a new room.
“I discovered the apparent change in housing selection this year through the panic in my floor’s Groupchat on the first day of room selection,” said Audrey Everett, an Environmental Science and Policy Major, who will be a senior next fall, also witnessed the madness of the room selection in RHO. “Someone had said they tried to select their room but it was already taken, so they selected my room instead. In fact, our entire floor had already been selected. I was shocked, this whole time I had thought I had priority on selecting my current room for the next year.”
After everything happened, a few of my friends decided to file their housing application as an attempt to make sure they got housing after originally being unsure about filing their application. They filed their housing application Monday, Feb. 19, paid the application fee on the morning of the 21 and the time slot they got assigned was Feb. 26 at 11:30 a.m.
This assignment truly drove me crazy. How was it that, I, who filed my application months ago, only got a 30 minute head start on other students, who waited till the week of the application to get a time slot?
I am truly not buying the “multitude of factors” narrative that the USFSP Housing office is trying to push.
Regardless, this insanity lasted for the remainder of the week, until I heard off-the-record from a friend that works within Housing that as of Friday, Feb. 23, the school was completely out of single rooms on-campus.
This news really upset me, but I still held out hope, until my room selection date the following Monday, when I had to face the facts that the news was true.
I ended up being assigned to a six-person suite in Residence Hall One (RHO) with bunk beds.
To make matters worse, as per the housing contract, students only have 48 hours from room assignment to decided if they want to keep the room or cancel it. If they cancel after the 48 hours, unless they have a documented reason, students will have to pay the rate of their dorm for that semester over $1,000.
As a senior at USFSP, I physically can’t share a room with someone or do bunk beds, so me and others I know, had to make the decision to cancel our housing agreement. I’m now searching for any type of affordable, off-campus housing within the vicinity of the school.
USFSP Housing completely failed their students. The absolute lack of communication this semester to inform their students of what they need to do to prepare for the room selection is, to me, outrageous.
“I totally understand the reasoning behind switching priority to roommate groups in order to fill up the most suites with students who want to room together, but not stating this change explicitly or clarifying that current students could not reserve their current room was unfair,” Everett says. “Had I known [Housing was] prioritizing big groups, and I couldn’t reserve my current room, I would have added two more friends to my Roommate group. I read the selection schedule, all emails and documents before room selection but the details were still unclear. It was very confusing to make students list preferences and fill out a Roommate comparability form when it turned out you could just select whatever room was available and anyone, even if they are highly incompatible with you, could join your room/suite if the space was available.”
After a quick look through old emails and the USFSP Housing social media pages, their lack of communication is obvious.
For one, housing did not make any statements during the week of the room draft, when, last year, housing sent out a statement at the end of the second day updating students on taken rooms and availability. Meanwhile, last year housing posted on its social media platforms a detailed graphic explaining who will be able to select rooms each day and what needs to be done ahead of time.
This year? Nothing. They were radio silent on social media all semester.
Ultimately, this failure of communication to students has led to many who wanted to live on-campus to move off-campus.
Ironically, a few days after I cancelled my contract, Housing emailed to ask for feedback and more information about why I cancelled.
USFSP Housing has lost the trust, and the money, of returning and upperclassmen students on-campus. Next year is my final year with the school, so who knows how the competition and issues with housing on-campus will progress, and if Housing will be able to right its wrongs.
