About 8,400 students are living on campus this semester.
Ohio University expects to have no trouble housing students in the dorms this year, despite the fact that this year’s freshman class shattered the application record and is expected to break the enrollment record again.
Residence halls have about 8,600 beds to accommodate more than 8,400 students living on campus this semester, Peter Trentacoste, executive director of Housing and Residence Life, said in an email.
This past year, problems arose when more students enrolled at Ohio University than the university could house.
OU came up with two temporary solutions: Residential Housing converted some triples serving as doubles back to triples and some Residential Assistants had to share their rooms with non-RA students, according to a previous Post report.
By early September, however, no students were still assigned to live with RAs.
“For this year, we do not anticipate the same difficulty we experienced and we are excited to open Carr, Sowle, Luchs and Tanaka Halls,” Trentacoste said.
This year’s freshman class is expected to break the enrollment record with about 4,500 freshmen committing to enroll at the Athens Campus for fall semester, President Roderick McDavis said in a OU news release on July 20.
The official enrollment numbers for this year’s freshman class will not be available until a few weeks into fall semester. Last year’s freshman class included 4,377 students.
This summer, OU finished construction on four new dorms and a new learning commons on South Green. The new dorms, which include 912 beds, are part of Phase 1 of the university’s Housing Development Plan, Trentacoste said.
“In the short term, the addition of the new residence halls are assisting us with accommodating another large on-campus living population,” Trentacoste said.
Housing is planning the demolition of several campus buildings over the course of the next several years as part of its Housing Master Plan “in order to utilize the capacity of those buildings to allow swing space for renovations,” Trentacoste said.
Jefferson Hall will be closing in the spring for a year in order to renovate the building, Trentacoste said. Renovations on the building will begin after spring semester, he said.
Trentacoste said Cady Hall, Foster House and Brough House – currently unoccupied – will be the first buildings to be demolished and are slated to come down in the spring.
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