The theme song to “The Jefferson’s” alludes to a natural progression in life. People graduate college and live in undesirable but cheap apartments. As their career progresses and bank account expands over the years, they can eventually afford to “move on up to a deluxe apartment in the sky.” Such is life.

At SLU, though, this progression for some students now works backwards. Freshmen start out in their regular dorms. But then, as sophomores, in order to fulfill the sophomore residency requirement, they get first pick at the available, premium apartments in the Village, Grand Forest and Marchetti Towers. Then they become juniors and seniors, and there’s a legitimate chance some could be downgraded to Fusz or Marguerite if they want to live on campus.
Upperclassmen ending up in dormitories by default was one unfortunate consequence of making sure that incoming sophomores, who have a new residency requirement to fulfill, had enough spaces on campus. While we like the idea of the sophomore residency requirement, though it seems like it would be more effective if sophomores were together in the same residence halls rather than scattered in different apartments and dorm rooms across campus. But in the process of switching from a seniority system to this new system, next year’s upperclassmen got the very short end of this transition period stick, with little consolation, save the reassignment list.
Some of this is a matter of changing our collective perspective on this process. Prior to this year, the system we used meant that generally speaking, seniors and many juniors got to live in their first housing picks. That’s how it’s been for as long as all the current students have been here, and it’s come to be what we automatically expect. No wonder the outcome of next year’s housing assignments caught some of us off guard. But future generations of SLU probably won’t be able to imagine a time when nearly all juniors and seniors didn’t automatically live off campus. That’s all well and good, hypothetically, with one slight issue—the fact that for some, a $2,000 housing scholarship hangs in the balance.
So we propose an ultimatum: Either the sophomore residency requirement needs to go, or the housing scholarship needs to go. Right now, it does not seem that SLU is fully equipped to handle both simultaneously, especially if plans are to increase the size of incoming classes yet not build a new dormitory in the near future. We get it—building a brand new building on campus is no small feat, both in terms of scale and finances, and this is not exactly the most robust economic period in recent years.
Numerically speaking, perhaps SLU could continue to maintain both systems. Hypothetically, once sophomores are settled in their positions, perhaps scholarship holders would then pick from the leftovers, and perhaps there would technically still be enough beds to hold them. But just because one can do something, doesn’t necessarily mean one should. The fact that SLU worked with the owners of the Flats to arrange for an equivalent amount of money to be made available for students who would be losing their housing scholarship is commendable, and encouraging, since it shows a lot of effort on behalf of the students by the University.
But that is, currently, a one-year thing and merely a Band-aid on a larger problem. So if we’re keeping the residency requirement, then reallocate housing scholarship money to cover tuition instead. Don’t punish the housing scholarship recipients by leaving them to live in a less-than-desirable housing set-up their junior or senior year when they’re essentially being held hostage by their $2,000 scholarship.
Calling it a “choice” just because incoming upperclassmen aren’t being threatened with hot pokers if they don’t sign up for one of the last remaining dorm rooms in Marguerite is just playing semantics. Seniority may be gone from the official housing sign-ups for all intents and purposes, but we stand by the concept. By the time students reach their final year, they should be able to choose where they live, not simply end up with a communal bathroom and lofted beds because that was their only option that allowed them to keep the $2,000 they earned.