UC Irvine, which currently houses 10,500 students on campus, estimated an overflow of 400 students for this fall quarter. Within the past three years, the school’s enrollment has increased by 4,000 students including graduates and undergraduates.
‘UCI is very popular this fall. Several hundred students were over-projected,’ said William Zeller, director of housing. ‘We were able to accommodate the situation. Not the ideal [but] we think living on campus was our top priority and that was accommodated.’
To alleviate some of the pressure, the school reserved 60 spaces in Campus Village for freshmen.
Housing Services believe they are doing their best to provide freshmen the services they need, but a good number of first-year students, like Vicki Lew, live off-campus.
Lew recently settled in one of the Stanford Court apartments across from campus with three other students who were in similar situations.
‘I was very upset with the housing situation this year,’ Lew said. ‘When I found out I wasn’t going to live in the dorms I was so sad! … I told my mom and then right away I put my name on the waiting list for the dorms. … When I came here for orientation, my mother and I asked a lady if we should start looking for apartments or if we should continue to wait for the waiting list. She told us that we could do either and luckily we went to find an apartment. If we had not, then I would not be … here because I would have had nowhere to live and the housing office still hasn’t called me for the waiting list.’
Lew was disheartened when the housing office explained that they could not do anything to help her nor any of the other freshmen calling in with the same concern: ‘Where will we live this year and what happened to guaranteed housing for first-years?’
To remedy the situation, UCI is now guaranteeing two years of housing for the incoming freshmen and a large portion of campus housing will be dedicated to sophomores.
Not only has the school doubled some single rooms and tripled some double rooms, but it also went as far as to quadruple five of the study rooms in Middle Earth.
‘[The students living in the quadruples] have more square footage than a normal dorm,’ Zeller said. ‘Also, they try to match up two roommate pairs who have requested each other
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