Signing up for housing just got a lot simpler. Beginning in the fall, the College will reduce the number of options students have for housing, trimming rates. Instead of pricing triples and super singles separately, they have conflated the rates into a flat charge for singles and another for all multi-occupant rooms.
“The purpose, ultimately, is to have a single room rate,” Dean of Students Peter Goldsmith said. “The intention of that is to ensure that students are choosing rooms based on their seniority not based on what they can afford.”
Next year’s rooms will come in three sizes, each with its own rate: singles, multi-occupancy rooms and apartment housing (which includes the Firelands building and off-campus College properties).
The impetus, Goldsmith said, was twofold — both to ensure seniority and work towards improving accessibility to students on financial aid. Currently, financial aid packages provide only for the lowest room rate, double occupancy, and students must allocate more of their package to housing if they want a better room.
“In discussions with students about this over the last six months it seemed to them to be far more consistent with the ethos of the college that students choose rooms without regard to cost,” Goldsmith said.
Until a single rate is created, however, students on financial aid will still find themselves allocated only enough for a multiple occupancy room.
Streamlining rates did not avert price rises. Overall, room charges rose 6.2 percent from last year, nearly two percent more than the four percent increase the year before.
Off-campus college housing, which has long stood competitive with other town properties, now seems to be skyrocketing out of range: Woodland Street residences will run $544 a month. Landlords in town generally charge $250 to $350.
The one decrease: super singles will now be priced at the rate of a regular single. For those who manage to snag super singles next year, they will be $230 cheaper.
Vice President for Finance Ron Watts noted that augmented room charges, like tuition hikes, reflect the downturn in the College’s endowment.
“All the revenues are needing to go up to support what the occupant expenses are,” Watts said. “Obviously costs are going up, in that housing and dining are labor-intensive, and you do have salary increases and other increasing costs.”
Goldsmith said that Oberlin’s rates remain highly competitive with other schools in the Consortium on Financing Higher Education, of which Oberlin is a part. “Our room rates have consistently been at the bottom of the COFHE group, at least with the exception of Carleton,” he said.
ResLife Director Kim LaFond said he’s pleased the College has embraced the new changes.
“It’s easier always to have fewer rates,” he remarked. “Students have a better option; it may not have been in their reach before to get a certain type of housing, but now it may be in their realm.”
The one rate system, LaFond said, will likely be in place sometime in the next few years.
“There are a number of schools that have this one price system,” he said.