Louisiana State University is experiencing what other colleges might consider a good problem: Enrollment has increased by about 5,000 students between 2019 and 2024.
The challenge is housing them.
To accommodate all the new students—many of whom want to live in on-campus housing—the university has converted several kitchens in its Pentagon Community residence hall into dorm rooms, according to The Reveille, LSU’s student newspaper.
“We saw over the summer that there was a great demand to attend LSU and to live on campus from incoming first-year students and continuing students,” said Catherine David, LSU’s associate director of communications and development for the Department of Residential Life. “We looked at different spaces on campus that we could use as student rooms. We had to think outside the box.”
Ironically, the “rooms were originally student rooms transformed into kitchens,” David said.
The university is now tearing out the stoves, sinks and microwaves and reverting the kitchens back to dorm rooms fit for two students apiece, “doubling the capacity of the original space,” according to The Reveille.
Residents of the renovated Pentagon Community buildings will still have access to one kitchen per building, David said.
