“They [the housing office] told me they can’t make everybody happy, that was what they kept repeating,” said Maria Quintero, a third-year liberal studies major.
This sentiment seems to have echoed across campus as hundreds of students began scrambling for housing amid what appeared to be a system-wide glitch, policy shifts, and what seemed to be a critical shortage of space.
The housing system at Cal State Monterey Bay (CSUMB) faced changes this year when administration decided to move from a unit-based priority system, where students with more units were placed in earlier housing selection blocks, to a first-come-first-served basis, with time slots for later selection determined by when students submitted their initial reservation day applications.
Housing Director Jeff Cooper appeared in the Associated Students Senate to explain the change on Monday, citing an adherence to existing retail models like Ticketmaster, which force users to apply as fast as possible. When the new system opened at 9 a.m. on March 10, it was quickly flooded with over a thousand applications, according to Cooper. The servers slowed to a crawl.
“There were some perceptions that our portal crashed. Fun fact, it did not crash, it just got very, very slow,” explained Cooper in the Senate that Monday.
But what began as an inconvenience quickly spiraled out of control on Wednesday when the first cohort of rising upperclassmen prepared to select their housing spots. With a 9% increase in applications from year to year, according to Cooper, the housing department had already made the decision to open up the desirable Promontory housing options to the cohort of rising sophomores. By late that morning, it was clear that Promontory had already filled, with only slots for unfurnished rooms in East Campus remaining.
For some students, the situation felt like another instance of failure to acknowledge student feedback. Alex Mendez, a third-year humanities and communications major said, “This situation is so disheartening. I have so much love for what the school has brought me, but this feels like a betrayal every time they do something like this. It feels like they don’t care about us.”
Exacerbating the issue, a glitch seemingly occurred in the system, opening the floodgates to all applicants at 8 a.m. and allowing students who checked the housing website to apply well before their appointment times. The school communications office on Thursday was unable to confirm there were problems with the housing process. Meanwhile, many students like Anjole Leveron-Rivera were able to select housing slots first thing Wednesday morning.
“I got woken up [by a friend who had noticed the apparent glitch] a little after 8 a.m., being told to apply, and it was open, [even though] my time slot was at 4 p.m.,” said Rivera, a second-year marine science major.
Her experiences match many who attested to the same apparent glitch, accessing the selection system well before their time slots. Students who either couldn’t or didn’t know how to take advantage were left floundering, watching spaces fill even faster than their timeslots seemingly suggested.
Natalie Gutierrez, a second-year kinesiology major, expressed her frustration as her comparatively early time slot became useless. “I had my housing appointment at 9:30 a.m. today, and went on thinking there would be some options. I have the earliest time slot. I was in class, and there was only the East Campus and Promontory doubles…. The people who did their applications early, who got everything done early, shouldn’t be left in the dust because the website broke,” said Gutierrez.
Students with roommate groups experienced even more frustration, either having to separate or being forcibly separated to secure a room at all in the increasingly desperate circumstances.
Victor Chong, Gutierrez’s roommate, was one of many students who were unexpectedly and suddenly separated from their assigned, pre-chosen group. Chong, who originally applied to live with Gutierriez in the Promontory dorms, was instead separated from Gutierriez, and his time slot was delayed to noon the next day. “I felt like instead of them giving me solutions I got nothing from them except how great the housing options were, I felt like they didn’t wanna work with students and wanted to avoid students instead. You’d think with how it went last year they would have improved things,” Chong said, describing his experience in the housing office.
By the end of the day, the question remained whether space would be available at all for the large cohort of students with a selection slot on Thursday. By that morning, those fears would come true, with the system closing completely for an internal audit and students being alerted to their place on the waitlist after a mass email went out to those who didn’t get housing.
With a wait list of over 180 students and no space seemingly available, for many, the crisis has seemingly reached a fever pitch. Students without housing are still waiting on the results of the audit, among other things, to see if they will be able to live on campus next year.