On-campus housing started so well. We all bounded up the hill with our luggage and NSO nametags to find that the “Dorms Like Palaces” ranking from Princeton Review hit it right on the nose. If you lived on Lower Dorm Road, you could watch baseball games on your way to class and the sun sinking into the ocean on your way back. If you lived on Upper Road, well, the hills of Malibu were nice to look at too.
Sophomore year, most of the class traveled abroad, making housing choices a thing of the distant past. But then junior and senior year swung around, and many students wouldn’t come back to on-campus housing, choosing off-campus apartments for a variety of reasons: better prices, more space and more freedom — for both you and that poor puppy you had living under your bed in the dorm.
Pepperdine’s Associate Dean of Housing and Residence Life, Brian Dawson, decided to figure out exactly why students were making the move. Dawson is new to the university this academic year, and he has worked very quickly to determine why so many students leave on-campus housing as juniors and seniors. Using the student feedback, he has worked to institute some major changes for the coming year. We are appreciative of Housing’s efforts to communicate with students to make positive change.
First of all, gathering information is critical to any kind of cooperative change, and HRL did it well with the surveys they put out last semester. The surveys were extremely comprehensive and supplied the kind of info needed for HRL to determine why upperclassmen were looking elsewhere for housing.
The survey found that the price of on-campus housing is the biggest factor in the students’ decisions to move away for their junior and senior years. Kudos to Housing for being so responsive, taking this information and doing something with it. The price discount list that Housing released last week was impressive. The announced discounts lowered the price of housing significantly and brought Pepperdine housing much closer to the rates offered by competing apartment complexes.
It was evident that HRL worked hard on something that mattered to students, and we appreciate the effort to be accommodating. When 83 percent of respondents say that the cost of housing at Pepperdine caused them to move off campus, something clearly needs to change. Housing did make a change and not just in a little way either. Discounts as high as 38 percent for seniors are nothing to sneeze at, and when you figure in the money that will be saved by not having to furnish on-campus housing, the result is some big savings.
The Housing facelift doesn’t just benefit upperclassmen either. Themed sophomore housing is going to help enhance the sophomore experience in Malibu, which is great for making sophomore year special for those who choose not to go abroad. The inclusion of triples into the pricing scheme for the residence halls was another good idea showing that HRL was not just focusing solely on seniors and juniors when trying to make living on campus more affordable.
This kind of communication and adaptation is definitely a step in the right direction, and these improvements to housing will hopefully contribute to a stronger academic and social community on campus. With a lower price for housing, more people want to live on campus, and more people living on campus will contribute to a stronger academic community for obvious reasons. (You’ll be living at least 20 minutes closer to Payson, won’t you?) But really, more people on campus will certainly contribute to a more collaborative learning environment as well as a stronger social community due to the tighter proximity.
Another change — the new “placement days” — may end up being a bit chaotic, but this is the first time for something like this to be attempted, so a few hitches should be expected. A couple challenges with the logistics of the event will probably arise, but they could be smoothed out in the coming years. The big thing to keep in mind is that HRL is actually working to make housing better for students, and not just in huge ways like overhauling the selection process, but in smaller ways, too. (Remember the new furniture this year, or the Christmas gift of new showerheads?)
It is clear that Housing has really tried to both listen to students and improve the on-campus living experience for them, and we really appreciate the effort.
