Office of Housing and Residence Life @ Mason

Application Statistics

March 17, 2011

Below are some numbers that give you a sense of how many people applied for housing, what they are hoping to select, what we anticipate the Guaranteed Waitlist to look like, etc.

# applications received: 3993 (2171 female, 1822 male)

# people retaining alone or with their current roommate:  763

# people retaining and pulling in a new roommate/suitemates: 109

# people hoping for singles:  1240  (699 female, 541 male)

# people hoping for triples:  112 (46 female, 66 male)

# people hoping for doubles who have a preferred roommate: 1418 (800 female, 618 male)

# people hoping for doubles who do not have a preferred roommate: 235 (104 female, 131 male)

(Yes, we know those numbers don’t add up to exactly 3993 – there are a handful of applications that were canceled due to lack of housing Agreement, there are the students being pulled in by someone who is retaining, and there are a handful of people whose application information was incomplete and required follow-up.)

What do these numbers tell us?

Well, for starters, a lot of people are reapplying for housing!  This is exciting, but it also has some consequences.

Guaranteed Waitlist: At this time, we can say that the Guaranteed Waitlist will have several hundred students on it.  We can’t get more specific than that, yet.  We will post more information once retention is complete and once we see how many students don’t select during their windows.

General Waitlist: Because the Guaranteed Waitlist numbers are expected to be high, the chances of a student on the General Waitlist receiving an assignment offer will be low.  Students should certainly still apply for the General Waitlist if they want to live on-campus next year, but we want to make sure everyone understands that they should have a back-up plan in the event that they are not offered housing.

Triple Rooms: We noticed that demand for triples was pretty high this year.  Given that overall demand for housing is high, we decided it would be a win-win to create more triple rooms for next year.  There are various rooms on campus that are large enough to be used as a triple.  We have turned some of these rooms into triples for next year.

Five-Person Suites: By creating triple rooms, we also created a new option!  There will now be some suites in Blue Ridge, Piedmont, Shenandoah, and Tidewater that can accommodate five friends who want to live together.

Double/Roommate Selection: We were amazed (and encouraged!) by how many students indicated a preferred roommate on their application.  We created this process to improve the chances that preferred roommate pairs will be able to select together.  While we are confident that those chances have drastically improved from previous years, we want to make sure everyone understands that there still is no guarantee that a double room will be available for a roommate pair in this process.  Availability of double rooms relies greatly on the outcome of the retention process.  We anticipate that some of the pairs towards the end of the doubles/roommate process will need to select from spaces in partially occupied rooms.  It is also possible that some pairs won’t be able to select if all spaces in doubles are chosen by the time their lottery numbers come up.  In this case, they will still be able to participate in general selection.  Depending on their placement in the lottery, they may end up on the Guaranteed Waitlist, too.

Entry Filed under: Housing Selection 2011-2012. Posted in  Housing Selection 2011-2012 .