VCU student Justin Chamblee was lucky to obtain on-campus housing through the university’s lottery room selection. However, he is not happy. Instead he is frustrated. All students should be guaranteed housing, he said.
“I personally dislike and cannot stand this lottery selection,” says Chamblee. “When you pay your money, you should be able to have a dorm to live in.”
According to VCU’s residential life and housing Web site, the online lottery sign up process normally takes place in the beginning of February. Students, mostly freshman, who would like to stay on campus the next year, fill out an application online confirming that they want to be included in the lottery.
A few weeks after students sign up for the lottery, they are each issued a random number. Once they receive their number, the students are given a certain day and time in which they can sign up for housing. The catch is, the closer you are to number one, the better your chances are in getting housing.
The lottery room selection was done online. Students were given a time to choose their housing based on the random number they were given. Once they logged into the system, they had three minutes to choose a dorm from the rooms that were available.
Chamblee, a VCU freshman, was number 392 in the lottery. Although he obtained housing for next year, he has a couple of friends who are still without housing.
“I think it is wrong to get their [freshman] money to get them into the school and then leave you on your own as an upper classman to find housing,” says Chamblee.
Chamblee isn’t the only one frustrated by a lack of guaranteed housing on campus after freshman year. Kishona Lewis, a freshman at VCU, thinks that she wasted her time.
“If they had told me that I was probably not going to get housing when I signed up, then I could have started working on this [finding an apartment] sooner,” says Lewis. “[Instead of] at the last minute trying to find something and having to go to my parents to figure out something.”
Lewis was number 1,493 in the lottery. Although one of her friends was able to pull her in a dorm on MCV campus, she was still not satisfied with the housing situation.
“I was actually thinking about transferring because of the situation,” says Lewis. “I’m coming all the way from
Jane Firer, associate director for Administrative Operations, says that the lottery system was designed to be fair to all students who desire on-campus housing after their freshman year.
“In recent years, there has been a significant increase in upper-class students wanting on-campus housing,” says Firer. “Even though we have added significant upper-class spaces in our inventory over the past few years, we still do not have enough space to meet student demands. This is how the lottery came into play.”
Lewis agrees that the lottery seeks to give everyone the same opportunity to live on campus, but she believes that there is a better way to handle the situation. She suggests that VCU build more on-campus housing.
VCU is in the process of building a new engineering and business building across
“Approximately 400 [new] upper class student spaces are scheduled to be opened in fall 2008,” says Firer.
