Collegiate Times

Next school year, East Ambler-Johnston will be undergoing renovation, taking 400 beds out of comission. The opening of New Residence Hall East will make 250 beds available so the net loss is only 150 beds.

With 350 more freshmen coming to Tech than last year, though, there are going to be even more students subject to unconventional housing for the upcoming academic year.

Placing freshmen somewhere other than residence halls cheats them out of the on-campus experience, while temporary housing -- the practice of putting three students in a room designed for double occupancy, putting a freshman in with an RA or converting lounges into bedrooms -- makes for undesirable living conditions.

As most students can attest, the major positive aspect of most residence halls is their proximity to classes, food and other students.

Still, it's cruel to deny the members of the incoming class the experience of having their wet clothes dumped on the laundry room floor, having someone accidentally pull their curtain open mid-shower, having to wake up to an insufferable blaring and trudge outside on snowy nights, being solicited by strangers to play volleyball, having 20-person gossip sessions on the fluorescently lit linoleum and being at all times in walking distance from the substances advertised as food at DX.

Tech administrators couldn't have designed a better way to establish bonds between students.

There's nothing that brings people together faster than shared misfortune. The originators of residence halls, in all likelihood, also did not suspect the intractable potential of housing mass amounts of students in close quarters. In fact, encountering continual roadblocks on your quest to take care of your basic needs sort of just adds to the excitement when you're 18 or 19.

Temporary housing also seems to be a poor alternative. The unfortunate result of which is that a select group of poor souls are assigned to live with their RAs and are therefore condemned to an utterly infraction-free semester. Repurposing study lounges into bedrooms also shrinks the number of places available for use as a hiding place from the omnipresent roommate.

Whether because of an increase in Tech's stock or the fact that college educations are becoming more and more indispensable, the trend for the past several years has been an increase in the number of students who accept their admissions letters.

Certainly, though, there must be a way for the admissions office to more accurately predict the number of people who will want to attend Tech each fall.

The editorial board is composed of David Grant, Laurel Colella, Alexandra Kaufmann and Jenna Marson.