Res Ed changing housing lottery system

St. Bonaventure’s Residential Education department will introduce a new housing lottery system this year for students to select rooms for fall 2019.
The new lottery system will be completely upon class rank and total credit hours. Previously, all students who paid a housing deposit received a lottery number. The number could then lower with GPA and co-curricular deductions or increases from judicial additions.
“People will receive random lottery numbers based on what their class year is, so if they are going to be a senior, they’ll receive a lottery number in that lower set, juniors will be higher and next year’s sophomores will have the highest numbers,” Nichole Gonzalez, executive director for living and conduct, said.
Residential Education chose to change to a normal lottery system, in part because of the introduction of its new housing software, StarRez.
“It allows us to keep all our information in one place and access it from our laptops, as well as the iPads RAs use on duty, allowing them to see housing changes as they immediately happen,” Residence Director Jasmine Foster said. “It can also pull up accurate information they may need, such as emails, birth dates and room location.”
Gonzalez said most other schools do their lottery system in this way and do not have additions or deletions. With StarRez, in order to continue doing deductions, staff would have had to manually enter the values, which is the whole reason the software was purchased.
Additionally, Gonzalez and Foster said the deductions became essentially meaningless, as almost everyone was getting similar amounts of points taken off.
“The average GPA deduction we used was a 7, which equates to a 3.25 and a 3.5,” Gonzalez said. “If that’s the average, and it’s being multiplied by the number of credit hours, everyone is already getting a lot of deductions, making them meaningless.”
Finally, Gonzalez said she didn’t like the lottery system for philosophical reasons.
“This is something everyone has to do; everyone has to live on campus,” Gonzalez said. “To attach merits or demerits to something everyone has to do, something as basic as housing, I feel is just not fair.”
General housing selection will be similar to previous years, although it will all be online instead of having a night devoted to room selection. Apartment selection will have some changes, however.
“One of the issues we have with apartments is people work the system,” Gonzalez said. “They’ll have people sign on to their application, knowing they won’t be living there in the fall semester, whether that be they’re studying abroad or graduating early. We end up with apartment with two people or three people.”
Gonzalez said it isn’t fair there are half-full apartments while there are full apartment groups on the waitlist.
“This year, if someone pulls out of an apartment after room selection, the students will have to find another roommate,” Gonzalez said. “If they don’t have another roommate, they’ll be removed from the apartment, and the next apartment group on the waitlist will move up.”
Residential Education will also try to have a better grasp of the size of the incoming class in order to make enough space to bring back lounge areas in Loughlen Hall and try to avoid triple rooms in Doyle Hall.
One other additional change is the potential for Francis Hall to be reopened if needed, based on freshmen numbers and the number of seniors choosing to live on campus.
“If necessary, we will be opening Francis depending on what those numbers look like,” Foster said. “That’s great for us because that opens a larger number of singles and more spaces for our upperclassmen students.”
Gonzalez said she will be hosting many information sessions to explain the new housing process and how to use StarRez to choose a room. She encourages students to attend and bring a phone or laptop to be able to utilize the software.