Undergrads Invade
Off-Campus Areas

Catharine Clarke, cash-strapped college student, just got strapped further: Thanks to a shortage of campus housing, she's renting a cramped one-bedroom apartment that costs her almost $1,500 a year more than a dorm room.

"It's a definite crunch," says Ms. Clarke, an 18-year-old sophomore at Washington College in Chestertown, Md.

An acute housing crunch has hit campuses across the U.S., as children of Baby Boomers flock to school in record numbers. Enrollment in U.S. colleges is up one million from 1990 and will continue to swell throughout this decade. The undergraduate upsurge is catching most schools off guard: From Boston to Puget Sound, universities just don't have room for them all. So students are overflowing the dorms, filling up temporary housing and spilling into the surrounding neighborhoods.

"We're bursting at the seams," says Maureen McIntyre, a dean at Washington College.

A demographic wave is cresting -- and nearly everyone's getting soaked. Just when parents thought university bills couldn't get any higher, they did: Off-campus housing already costs more than dorm accommodations, and the newest crunch is pushing rents even higher in university neighborhoods. Residents of college towns are griping, too, when they learn that the new kid on the block is an 18-year-old freshman with a boom box and a beer keg.

Over the last three years, Lane Cooper, 35, has watched the quality of life in his Washington, D.C., neighborhood go downhill. Once filled with family homes, neat lawns and backyard swing sets, Burleith, near Georgetown University, has been invaded by students that he says litter, ignore home maintenance and party too much. The highlight of one recent bash: So many revelers crowded onto the deck of a house a couple doors down that it collapsed.

But oddly enough, the shabbier his neighborhood gets, the more his home is worth. Tight housing conditions are pushing up rents, and, by extension, home prices. Homes like Mr. Cooper's 1920s brick townhouse, which he bought in 1997 for $258,000, are now selling for an average of $279,500 -- an 8.3% gain, compared with a 4.8% rise in the Washington metropolitan area overall for the same period. Though that may be a boon should he decide to sell, in the short run, it means higher property taxes.

And the worst is yet to come. According to the Department of Education, enrollments in kindergarten through 12th grade hit a record 53.2 million last year and will swell until 2006. College enrollment was at 14.9 million last year and is expected to hit 16.3 million by 2009.

The bulge began to make headlines in the mid-1990s, when Princeton University in Princeton, N.J., had to lodge a number of students in mobile homes parked on campus. (The problem: More freshmen than ever had accepted the school's offer. Princeton has since built a big new dorm.) This fall, Monmouth College, in West Long Branch, N.J., put up about 10% of its incoming freshman class in a hotel a few miles away. Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y., ran out of regular dorm space for its freshmen and installed beds for 60 of them in student lounges. Washington College, which opened a 96-bed dormitory just two years ago and has more beds on the way, also is housing freshmen in converted dorm lounges. Like colleges everywhere, it has encouraged its upperclassmen to find off-campus housing.

And that has locals fuming. The griping is perhaps loudest in college-studded Boston, where there are about 35,000 more students than there are dorm beds to accommodate them. "Our affordable housing is being eaten up," says Stephen J. Murphy, a city councilman-at-large. He explains that landlords often favor students over families, because by renting individual rooms to students, they can pull in three times as much as they would get renting the entire house. His proposal: Charge universities $1,000 per semester for each student they can't house on campus, and use the money to build affordable housing.

Riding Out the Wave

But universities are in a bind, too. Though the neighbors usually don't like students next door, they've also tended to oppose construction of big new buildings in their backyards. Getting funds and approval for new construction takes years, so some schools appear to be riding out the wave without erecting new residences. At the University of Colorado at Boulder, where student enrollment has been swelling steadily, "they haven't built a dorm room in decades," says Leslie Durgin, a senior development officer.

Others have new residences in the works. At the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Wash., where roughly half of the students live off campus, there are plans to open a new dorm two years from now. But associate dean for student development Jim Hoppe worries that even that might not be enough: "The problems are not likely to go away soon."

Although many colleges make an effort to house younger students, graduate students are often left to scramble. Danielle van Jaarsveld, a graduate student at Cornell, pays $660 for a one-bedroom apartment near the university, but says that similar on-campus digs -- if she could get them -- would cost about $200 less. Princeton graduate student Bei Hu says the housing market near that university is so tight and pricey that many of his fellow students have taken to sleeping in their friends' living rooms.

In Ivy League towns, housing costs are also pushed higher because of another university-related problem: New graduates move to these neighborhoods to take jobs at the high-tech companies that tend to gravitate there. In Cambridge, Mass., home of both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, home prices have grown 16.2% over the past year, compared with 12.9% for the Boston metropolitan area as a whole, according to Cambridge-based economic research firm Case Shiller Weiss. That's especially hard on elderly and disadvantaged residents who want to rent or buy housing, says Paul Turcotta, a local real-estate agent.

Rice and Beans

Some parents are trying to blunt the financial trauma by buying a place outright for their children. That's what Wayne and Heather Hall did when they decided that three of their four children would attend the University of Cincinnati, where Mr. Hall is an associate dean. The couple paid about $50,000 for a 1,200-square-foot bungalow close to the college. Although the house is old and needs major repairs, the Halls are gambling they'll turn a profit when they finally sell. In the meantime, Mrs. Hall says, they will recoup some of their investment with the rent they will collect from their children. Each will be required to kick in $300 a month.

Elsewhere, surplus students are fending for themselves -- and learning some real-life lessons along the way. At Washington College, Ms. Clarke is working as a waitress after classes to help pay for her $450-a-month apartment. And senior Jennifer Lubkin has taken a part-time clerical job, and doubled up with a roommate to save money. It's not quite how Ms. Lubkin imagined college life. "We eat a lot of rice and beans," she says.

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