University Star

Sophomores older than 20 with more than 42 credit hours will not have to live on campus come fall semester, according to the director of housing and residential life.

Rosanne Proite said Wednesday the housing policy will undergo a “temporary adjustment” to make room for incoming freshman, and the change will take place in the 2009 to 2010 academic year.

“We have made this temporary adjustment to accommodate an increasing number of incoming new students,” Proite said. “The number of students who just simply want to live on campus has increased.”

She said more students are returning to residence halls because of the convenience of living on campus.

“We are also seeing a very small increase here at Texas State in the number of students above the credit limit who want to be on campus,” Proite said. “If you are on campus, you get different kinds of amenities than you do off campus. We take care of all your utilities, you get the on-campus Internet connections, and those things have worth to people.”

Proite said the incoming freshmen are the biggest concern for housing space.

“Our primary obligation is to those incoming freshmen students. We need to have enough space for them,” Proite said. “That is the primary reason we lowered (the hour requirements) temporarily until we can figure out where we are headed with other facilities.”

Residence life affiliates plan to hire a housing consultant company to help with new developments on campus. Proite said she hopes they will assist with decisions regarding renovations and the destruction of dorms.

“(They) will come in and work with us to develop sort of a long range set of plans for all of our halls,” Proite said. “Which ones are worth major renovations and which ones do we need to tear down, because it would cost more to renovate than it would to build?”

Proite said new residence halls will be needed in the future because of student increases. She said architectural plans have been completed for a new residential hall. However, she said the plans have been delayed. New beds will be needed to accommodate the growing numbers.

“More and more students want to be on campus,” Proite said. “Plus, the institution is growing, and you can’t have the same number of beds and have those two collide.”

Proite said administrators want to have space for all students.

“We could say ‘you know what, we are not going to have a residency requirement,’ but the reality is the university believes in that requirement, and the reason is the 50 years of research done,” she said. “We want to have that residency requirement, but we also want to make sure we can accommodate anyone who wants to live on campus.”

Chanell Goodright, geography sophomore, disagreed with the assessment that dorms are overcrowded.

“I don’t think (there is a need for more residence halls) because there is so little room on campus right now, and they would have to just get more parking,” Goodright said. “More parking means taking up more land, and in a geography sense, that is not a good thing.”The Department of Housing and Residential Life will be sending letters to all residence halls and Bobcat Village students with notifications of the change early next week.