If you’d asked me last year if Park Place or Aspyre were part of campus, I would’ve told you no. It's a fairly long walk to Park Place, and Aspyre has a brutal hill and a set of railroad tracks between it and the university. But now they are both technically considered on-campus housing. There are also freshmen living in both to satisfy the requirement that they live on campus their first year. The juxtaposition of the rule and the results shows that it’s time to re-evaluate the freshmen housing mandate.
The case for having freshmen live on campus is rather compelling at first glance. The university will claim that freshmen need access to classes and activities, as well as spaces designed with community in mind. I won’t challenge those arguments. I will challenge how seriously the school actually takes them. The presence of freshmen in obviously off-campus buildings means one of the following must be true: The university knowingly admitted more freshmen than they could hold on campus, or the university let freshmen live off campus so long as they were still paying them.
They both amount to the same thing. Someone high up decided that having freshmen live close to other buildings and students wasn’t important enough to actually make them live there. That raises the question of why they make several thousand students pay a premium for housing for reasons the university itself acknowledges aren’t compelling enough to actually make freshmen live in the physical area of campus.
Frankly, the requirement is just a way for the university to forcibly drain thousands of dollars from students, some of whom might struggle to pay the fee. The policy is classist and no longer has a compelling reason to exist. Either the university needs to make sure all freshmen actually live in housing that is on campus, or they need to drop the requirement altogether.