April 15, 2022 | NEWS | By Leigh Walden | Photo by Daniel de Koning
Campus housing registration has brought on angst and disappointment for some students, and this week that dissatisfaction grew stronger as Colorado College announced that it would need to delay housing registration until the 27th and 28th due to a glitch within their software system. For students who already received housing this will make little to no impact; for others this interferes with housing plans and for others, still, prolongs the anxiety surrounding what can be an incredibly stressful process.
This week, registration for housing was supposed to take place for all students who were not assigned housing in an LLC, cottage, or apartment for the 2022-2023 school year. This process was well underway when the housing department realized part of the software for registration was not functioning appropriately. In a combined statement from CC’s Director of Residential Life, Samantha Soren, the Assistant Vice President for the Residential Experience, Edwin Hamada, and Anneke Bruwer, CC’s housing operations specialist, this software was producing glitches like showing a smaller number of rooms were available than were actually available.
“On Tuesday afternoon, we realized that any time a student selected a space in a double room without a matched roommate, the room would no longer be visible for selection. While we have enough spaces for all students required to live on campus, it would appear to students as if we were short even more spaces,” said Soren, Hamada, and Bruwer.
These shortages of rooms were noticed early on by students who still underwent the panic of trying to find a room as spaces seemingly rapidly filled up early this week. “I had an early-ish log on to register and I went on there and was like ‘woah, if I don’t want to live in Mathias again there are very limited options for me to have even just a single next year,’” said an anonymous rising sophomore.
What looked like a lack of rooms will be fixed in time for registration on the 27th and 28th. In addition, the housing group reported they would be hosting events like social mixers to help students meet potential roommates as well as regularly updating the housing selection page online with the latest developments on housing.
The housing department at CC has not been explicit about what goes into the selection process for apartments on campus, which has led some students to believe there are socio-economic or racial components to their decisions. Outside of that, some students just feel like their rooms aren’t going to fully provide them with the space they need to succeed on the Block Plan.
“It’s annoying because I know what I need for next year and I’m trying to self-advocate for a single,” Grace Cutler, a rising sophomore said. “But it doesn’t even seem like it’ll matter because there’s still just not enough rooms.”
Other students feel like their trust for the housing department generally has deteriorated. “They’re gaslighting me,” Kenna Grenier ’25 said. “I am supposed to get priority because I’m in a forced triple but they redid the floor plan (is what I was told) and it says my room is a real triple and so I didn’t get any priority. [Now] my time slot is the second half of the day on the last day.”
Additional information went out to students on April 14th and some additional opportunities for students to join LLCs will also become available to sophomores who may have missed the deadline.
The response from the housing leadership group said that some things would be different next year: “We are finalizing our contract to bring in a new housing software that will make the online selection process so much better for our students. With Starrez, students will be able to see the physical floorplans of the building embedded in the system and select a room right on the floor plan. They will also be able to see roommate information within the portal and facilitate some roommate matching via the portal. We also anticipate being able to do both apartment and cottage selection via the new software.”
For some students, however, this new software doesn’t seem like the fix CC needs. Instead, they wish CC would invest in more housing. “At this point it just doesn’t even seem like a three year housing guarantee,” said Cutler.