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Purdue Spending About $250K To Cover Off-campus Student Housing Assignments

Courtesy Blackbird Farms
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Hundreds of Purdue students starting classes this month will be living off-campus – despite requesting to live in on-campus dorms. And the school says it’ll pay them for their trouble.

University Residences Director of Administration Mike Shettle says students who didn’t meet the application deadline for on-campus housing will be accommodated, but some will be living at the Union Club Hotel or in local commercial apartment buildings.

Shettle says those students will still experience a dorm-like environment.

“So then we’re treating them very similar to how we would do our on-campus housing,” he says. “We have residence assistants, we have programming similar to what would be experienced on-campus.”

To make up for the difference in cost between a dorm and an apartment, the university is giving students subsidies to cover a portion of the rent.

Shettle says this year, the school saw the most students coming back to live on campus since the late 1990s. Plus, the city demolished 12 university apartment buildings as part of the State Street overhaul.

Shettle says even with yearlong planning, corners had to be cut.

“That’s things like taking some larger single rooms and turning them into doubles and taking some doubles and turning them into triples – and that adds a certain number of beds,” he says. “But, it wasn’t enough to compensate for the number of beds lost.”

Shettle says admission numbers were higher than expected, and he expects the university to be at full capacity until more on-campus housing is built over the next few years.

He says the school is currently working through the transfer student wait list for room assignments.

The university is giving about $1,000 subsidies to more than 200 students who were assigned off-campus apartments instead of dorm rooms.

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