Universities with increasing enrollments have long struggled to accommodate every student who wants to live on campus. Short-term solutions to the issue have varied, from setting students up in nearby hotels to incentivizing them to live elsewhere.
But a new solution at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has caused major backlash from the university’s resident assistants: for the first time this fall, freshmen will be assigned to temporarily bunk with RAs, who traditionally are afforded a private space in exchange for the work they do. In exchange, the RAs will receive a stipend of $125 a month.
An email notifying RAs of this change arrived July 26, a week and a half before they move in for fall semester training on Aug. 6. At that point, it was nearly impossible to find another housing arrangement for the fall, one third-year RA, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her job, told Inside Higher Ed via text.
“I’m mostly disappointed [and] frustrated about the lack of notice and communication,” the RA said. “It’s a little insulting, truthfully, [and] definitely does nothing to make us feel valued and appreciated for all we do.”
UIUC isn’t the only university that has opted to room freshmen with RAs. But it’s a relatively rare solution to a widespread problem, according to Jason Lynch, an assistant professor of higher education at Appalachian State University who studies residential life.
Universities periodically go through phases when on-campus living is in high demand. Lynch said he himself had numerous friends temporarily living in a hotel when he was a freshman; more recently, demand for campus housing rose at many institutions after pandemic lockdowns were lifted and students craved face-to-face interaction with friends and peers.
UIUC’s issues this year may have been caused in part by the bungled rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which massively delayed the timeline on which incoming students decided where they wanted to attend college. Chris Axtman-Barker, associate director of communications and marketing for university housing at UIUC, said there is typically a small handful of students without a room assignment in July, and summer melt ends up opening up extra space. But this year, the university had pushed back its enrollment deadline—and its housing contract deadline—in response to the FAFSA delays, resulting in high numbers of students applying to live on campus later than usual.
“We are in a different situation than we hoped,” Axtman-Barker told Inside Higher Ed. “I do want to say, we’re sorry that we’re here. We’re sorry to our RAs that this is happening … We wouldn’t be doing it if we didn’t think it was completely necessary.”
‘Added Level of Stress’
Rooming freshmen with RAs appears to have been a last-ditch effort to accommodate the new students at UIUC, where freshmen are required to live on campus. (Axtman-Barker said the university did not consider dropping that requirement for a year, citing a statistic that UIUC students are over twice as likely to graduate if they live on campus than if they don’t.)
In an email obtained by Inside Higher Ed responding to RAs’ concerns about rooming with freshmen, the university’s director of residential life, Herb Jones, noted that the university has taken several other steps to try to open up space in the residence halls. The institution offered returning students a $2,000 credit to their student account and 100 meal tickets to cancel their housing contracts, and a dorm reserved for upperclassmen was changed to mostly house freshmen.
But Lynch said he was surprised that the university took such an extreme step as rooming freshmen with RAs, which he said seems detrimental to both parties.
RAs often suffer from burnout and other mental health consequences due to their notoriously intense jobs, which can involve responding to emergency situations, tackling complex interpersonal issues and being on call into the early hours of the morning. Having a roommate at all, let alone one for whom they are responsible as part of their duties, could make it challenging to get the rest they need.
“They already live where they work, but now that level of intrusion is magnified,” Lynch said. “In a way, they are in service to their residents; their job is tied to their service of residents, so there’s that added level of stress of having to be on all the time.”
The third-year RA said that she and her colleagues will be significantly hindered in performing their job duties if they live with one of their residents. For example, RAs often host confidential conversations with residents in their room, which they can’t do if another person is present. They also finish their final rounds of the night at 1 a.m. and may spend hours after that in their room writing an incident report.
“Poor freshmen who have to deal with that,” she said.
Axtman-Barker said that he is aware of how challenging certain RA duties will be under the circumstances. During upcoming fall training, he said, RAs will receive guidance and resources on how to deal with the unusual situation, including information about other places they can go to conduct confidential conversations.
It is unclear at the moment what percentage of RAs will have a roommate, Axtman-Barker noted, though that will most likely be solidified this week. The student who spoke to Inside Higher Ed said she may quit her RA job if she gets paired with a freshman roommate.
“I would stay if I knew that it would only last for a month, but I don’t trust Housing, and their lack of answer[s] makes me believe they’re estimating it for much longer,” she said. “I’m apartment shopping right now.”