The past few weeks had students scrambling to finalize their housing plans for next semester. Friday, Feb. 16 was the deadline to fill out the online housing questionnaire, forcing students to decide where they most wanted to live even though next semester still seems quite far in the future. Although always a popular choice for upperclassmen, off-campus housing allotments have been decreasing every year in recent memory.

The number of students released this year, between 400 and 425, is the same as last year. However, there has been an overall downward trend in the number of students allowed to live off campus each year.

In the second half of the 1990s, the amount of students living off-campus grew every school year. By the fall of 2001, approximately 945 students lived in town houses, more than a third of the entire student body. A decision by the Board of Trustees mandated that this number shrink, and the school began to implement its village housing strategy to accommodate the larger number of students housed on-campus.

According to Director of Residential Education Molly Tyson, the reasons for the trend are twofold. “The numbers of students living off-campus have been steadily declining because the capacity is increasing, plus enrollment is also decreasing.”

In other words, the school accepts fewer students and has more beds to fill, and thus this year only about 15 percent of students are not in a dorm, co-op, or village house.

Until two years ago, Oberlin was able to release all students who wished to live off-campus. However, in 2005, the off-campus lottery became an issue for the first time. At the same time, the literature that the College sends to incoming students underwent a change. Where it used to say that students could expect to live off campus their senior year, the expectation is now that students will be residential through all four years.

According to College President Nancy Dye, the decision to bring back many students living off-campus was the result of several factors. Dye cited the questionable safety of many off-campus houses, problems with absentee landlords, the strain on town-gown relations and the fact that “frankly, we were not housing as many students as would be desirable for revenue purposes.”

A residential campus also fosters a desirable type of campus community, according to Dean of Students Linda Gates. “People get to know each other better,” she said. “They build bonds.”

Gates thought that it was hypocritical for Oberlin to call itself a residential campus if a third of the students are living off-campus, and in potentially poor quality houses.

 “Why are we letting our students pay landlords rent for substandard housing that is not safe when we could have housed them ourselves?” she asked. “We didn’t just do it for money, but if students are going to pay for housing, they need to be safe. Oberlin should derive some benefit for providing that service to students in this residential community.”

While empty beds are clearly a source of lost revenue, housing students on campus is no great windfall, according to Vice President for Finance Ron Watts.

“In most cases bringing the students back and building Union Street or Phase Two housing is not a great positive financial impact,” he said. “There are cases where that is a negative financial impact.”

Many of Oberlin’s peer institutions do not release any students except a very few with specific reasons for exemption. Wesleyan University, for example, requires students to live in dorms or houses and apartments owned by the University. Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR, however, allows students to live off-campus as soon as they have lived on-campus for two years or are 21 years old.

Given the decrease in total enrollment mandated by Oberlin’s Strategic plan and the new on-campus housing that is on the horizon, students can expect the overall downward trend in off-campus housing to continue.