Upperclassmen deserve better housing options

Ross Passeck, Associate editor

While the housing process was streamlined, many students are finding themselves in sardine-like living quarters next semester.

What is more troubling is it is not the underclassmen paying their dues to the college experience.

Many juniors and seniors living in on-campus apartments are going to be experiencing less than spacious living conditions.

Many of the Blaine street apartments, or “the greens,” have been adapted from doubles to “triples.”

Students have expressed frustration with this policy because while it may resolve the problem of providing housing for everyone, it is frustrating to be paying upwards of $2,700 dollars a semester for a bedroom similar in size to that of a dormitory double.

On top of that there is the awkward tension that one person will be paying the same price for his or her own bedroom.

This is something certain to be a silent point of tension between future roommates.

Juniors and seniors in particular should be able to live independently if they have put in their time in the dorms.

Managing study habits and intimate times with significant others is a tedious exercise and one that upperclassmen should be able to avoid in their final years at Linfield.

If Linfield Residence Life is unable to accommodate upperclassmen with the living space they have earned after two years at Linfield, it is not an extreme proposal to consider off-campus housing to be extended to juniors as well.

Any Linfield student who has conversed with students at a state school has probably been met with a confused look and the question, “They make you live on campus as a junior?”

While Resdience at Linfield has always worked to help create strong, beneficial community spaces for residents, it seems that the number of students currently at Linfield and starting school next fall are more than campus housing has experienced in a while.

Another possible increase to on-campus could be the number of male students in fraternities who decide to continue to live in campus housing, be that the dorms or apartments, and forgo living in their respective fraternity.

Obviously conditions are different at state schools but it is all the more irritating when students find themselves living in dorm-quality housing at Linfield for three years while students at schools around the country can live off campus as early as the second semester of their freshman year.

Upperclassmen need more of a private space to live so they can start learnng what it is like to live on their own.

Upperclassmen have paid their dues, financially and in their time at this college.

Their housing conditions should be placed at a higher priority than the direction it is heading.