By Khalida Sarwari
More than a couple hundred returning San Jose State University students will have to trade in their dorm for a hotel room this year to accommodate an unexpected surge of incoming freshmen, but which hotel they’ll be staying at is up in the air.
The university sent out letters last week notifying 250 returning students they would be evicted from their on-campus dorms and moved into a hotel.
The school is still in the process of finalizing a contract with the hotel with the aim of announcing the name by the middle of this week.
“We realized it was difficult without a hotel contract in place,” university spokeswoman Pat Lopes Harris said. But, she added, “We wanted to tell them as soon as possible.”
Whichever hotel is selected in the end, students can be assured it will be business-class, within walking or light-rail distance, and most importantly — safe.
The decision to move the returning students was made because the university last year required all incoming freshmen who live more than 30 miles away to live on campus their first year.
“Studies show that students who live on campus have higher success rates, higher graduation rates,” Harris explained. “However as we all now know, we ended up with an unusually large freshman class.”
Harris said the university is expecting an estimated 4,000 freshmen this fall — compared with last year’s roughly 2,700 students — and the biggest freshman class the university has had in 10 years.
To meet the demand, the university initially tried assigning three students to some of the larger dorm rooms, but when that did not completely resolve the problem, the school started to consider alternative accommodations. After seeing that other universities were using hotels to house students, SJSU housing staff started considering that option.
The 250 students who are being evicted have been given a July 25 deadline to either relocate to a hotel before school begins on Aug. 24 or cancel their housing contract and receive a refund.
Harris said the university has received some complaints from parents and students about the safety and inconvenience of moving away from campus or the possibility of being mixed in with hotel guests.
Nathan Chein was among numerous students who expressed their concerns on the university’s Facebook page. He said he felt “slightly betrayed” by the university.
“I was promised that by returning for my second year, I would be allowed to choose whom I would like to room with as well as where specifically I would like to room,” Chein wrote. “I feel as if I have been lied to. Due to this mishap, I am forced to ask myself where I will be rooming during this upcoming academic year.”
He questioned how far of a distance the hotel would be from the campus, how students would be able to eat, and why students are being asked to make a decision without being given more information about the hotel.
Harris said San Jose State would find ways to address those concerns, many of which have been posted on the university’s housing services website: http://housing.sjsu.edu/documents/Relocation%20Docs/FAQ%20Sheet.pdf.