After a 30% increase in Temple’s freshman class, residence halls on campus are near maximum capacity and the university has made changes to its regular housing processes.
Temple’s Class of 2028 is made up of 4,926 students, and almost all of them are living in one of the university’s seven on-campus residence halls.
The typical room change form on the MyHousing portal is now unavailable to on-campus residents this year. The University Housing and Residential Life’s online schedule for the 2024-25 year shows that both Fall and Spring semester dates for room changes are still “to be determined.”
“We have a little bit of fluctuation for room changes, emergencies, different things like that,” said Ashley Hubler, associate director of housing operations. “But it’s definitely not like last year, where it was like, ‘Oh, anybody can room change.’ We just don’t have that much flexibility this year.”
UHRL experienced their busiest season in mid-May, when the deadline to commit to Temple was pushed back to May 15 after the Free Application for Federal Student Aid changed their deadline for applications, Hubler said. By June, housing was filled up in all of their available slots.
By the university’s August move-in date, UHRL was at 97% capacity after most students finalized their financial aid options. Housing is currently at 95% occupancy, with the remaining 5% reserved for accommodations and emergencies. Capacity has hovered between 80-89% in previous years, Hubler wrote in an emailed statement to The Temple News.
Temple also admitted about 300 students from the University of the Arts this semester after the school’s unexpected closure during the summer. Almost 100 of those students now live on Temple’s campus, and while they did contribute to the higher occupancy, they were not a major factor that affected occupancy increases in on-campus housing, Hubler wrote.
UHRL typically retains a certain amount for returning students when allocating housing each year. After that, they will open slots to its incoming class and release more rooms if the occupancy numbers are lower than expected, Hubler said.
While the room change form is not available to students on the MyHousing portal this academic year, students can still reach out directly to their resident assistant or resident directors. The current priority of the housing staff is to navigate through any conflict between roommates, unless the situation is urgent in which a student can be granted emergency approval for a room change.
Students like Kyla Randall looked into changing housing options due to her worries about the conditions of her room at Johnson and Hardwick Halls.
“I was really shocked about how everything was because they showed videos from five years ago,” said Randall, a freshman journalism major. “Of course, it’s not gonna look like how it is now. But long story short, a couple weeks moved on, and that’s when I started really paying attention to everything. And like I said, I saw black mold, green mold, all types of stuff.”
Temple includes floor plans of each of its six buildings on the UHRL websites, including an option to virtually tour each type of room. The website does not specify when the virtual examples were recorded and posted.
Aside from structural concerns, some students experienced difficulty putting together quad groups during room selection during the summer. Temple requires students to have their groups set to ensure that all four individuals will be in the same room they requested.
“I haven’t tried to change the room during the year,” said Samantha Rogers, a freshman marketing major. “But in the beginning, before we even got to school, I tried to switch into a different room due to issues with making [roommate] groups.”
Rogers’ quad group placement didn’t work on the MyHousing portal. They then called UHRL, who were not able to make any changes, and the group was split up.
Students can make roommate groups before and after their room selection time opens up. The group option requires that one person make a group and add in the three additional individuals, rather than each two units making a group separately.
A student has to do matching ahead of time, which allows for them to pull everyone into the unit all at once. Once the selections are made, UHRL tries its best to work around any issues, but they cannot kick out one side of the group to make changes for another, Hubler said.
“The MyHousing portal should be less complicated for incoming freshmen,” Rogers said. “Maybe like more tutorials and more seminars on how to work it because I think that was our biggest issue.”
Hubler said she hopes on-campus resident numbers continue to grow, but there are currently no plans to expand housing if enrollment numbers continue.
In the past, Temple has had partnerships with off-campus properties in the event that there was no room for students to move in on-campus. No such partnership currently exists, but the UHRL can still help students who want to move off campus.
“University Housing and Residential Life also has an off campus living office, so we’re able to help students no matter what they want to do,” Hubler said. “We’re able to kind of push them in the right direction.”
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