ACUHO-I News Blog

For college freshmen, moving onto campus and officially entering the undergraduate experience can be frightening, sure. But these fears are generally overshadowed by the excitement of meeting new roommates, enrolling in classes, exploring campus, and all manner of Welcome Week activities with enough university swag and free food to fill a residence hall room.

The experience of parents dropping off their students offers less distraction, and more difficulty. In today’s world of GPS trackers in cell phones and moms and dads adding sons and daughters on Facebook, it’s widely accepted that this generation of parents is more involved in their childrens’ lives than ever before. This creates a challenge for university personnel, who must ensure that both the incoming crop of students and their parents feel cared for and comfortable with the move-in process, while still allowing for the inevitable separation that will occur.

According to this LA Times article, more and more colleges and universities are offering “parent orientations” to help parents adjust to the idea of leaving their children on their own. These workshops address nearly every detail about the college experience that might give a parent anxiety, including dorm life, financial aid and alcohol abuse. Some schools are even hiring new staff to serve as full-time parent liaisons.

And this NY Times article (with the accompanying ‘Letter to the Editor’ responses!), looks at approaches taken by universities designed to “punctuate and speed the separation,” including formal departure ceremonies and official check-out times for parents.

Any personal or professional stories from members? Over-anxious parents, attending seminars for first-year students? Or sneaking into freshman book discussion groups? What changes have been made (if any) to manage those parents who have a tough time letting go?

Semi trucks! Volunteer moving teams! Interior design for dorms! Organized chaos!

For housing departments at colleges and universities across the country, the next couple of weeks mean the stress and strain of new and returning students moving in on campus. They’re bringing with them anxious families, increased traffic, and all the comforts of home (and maybe a semi truck or two). Here’s a round-up of campus move-in news from around the nation:

The ABCs of Moving the Kids to College : From the Minneapolis Star Tribune, common (and not-so-common) mistakes parents make as they help their kids with the big move.

Vanderbilt Students Return to Campus Aug. 21, Move-In Goes Green: How one university is attempting to reduce the environmental impact of move-in day, one cardboard box at a time.

Residence Hall Move-In Starts Sunday: At Texas A&M, Residence Life has designated August 22 as “Residence Hall Move-In Assistance Day,” with teams of move-in volunteers there to assist and welcome new and returning students.

New Vaccine Requirement for Incoming College Students: A new Texas-wide state law addresses the dangers of bacterial meningitis. Though it went into effect January 1, the incoming freshman class moving in this fall will put it to the test.

Dorm-It-Yourself: In the video below, a student from Ryerson University School of Interior Design  gives tips and tricks for sprucing up a student residence (on a student budget!)

How about you, members? Any crazy stories, interesting initiatives or new tricks you’ve discovered this move-in season?

This all-too-brief photo essay in the New York Times visits several student theme houses, with focuses you may not have heard of…the Bro’chet Society, the  Civil War, and pop culture of various decades in the 20th century.

More and more, theme housing is what students make of it, not what the institution thinks they should do. What themes have your students selected and executed? Were you surprised by the success of some of them?

The New York Times has a story on the prestige of occupying a residence hall room that was once the home to someone notable. (Perhaps he or she wasn’t notable at the time, but went on to accomplish great–or notorious?–things.)

What famous persons have lived on your campus? Does your institution make the students now occupying those rooms aware of that?

Purdue University’s student newspaper, The Exponent, did a three-part series on roommate relationships. The stories profile three successful roommate pairings. The stories are: “Roommates become closer through crisis, culture,” “Roommates bond over paper airplanes, pranks,” and “Twin sisters grow closer as roommates.”

If you’re in a more academic mood, below is a sampling of research on the effects roommates have on each other.

What were your college or university roommates like? Do you have any good stories from your campus?

Roommate Effects on Grades: Evidence from First-Year Housing Assignments. McEwan, Patrick J.; Soderberg, Kristen A. Research in Higher Education v. 47 no3 (May 2006) p. 347-70

Judging Roommates by Their Facebook Cover. Farrell, Elizabeth F. The Chronicle of Higher Education v. 53 no2 (September 1 2006) p. A63-A64

College Living: Issues Related to Housecleaning Attitudes. Ogletree, Shirley M.; Turner, G. Marc.; Vieira, Ana. College Student Journal v. 39 no4 (December 2005) p. 729-33

Picture it. Me growing up in North Canton, Ohio, in 1985.

At dinner on a summer night, I announced to my parents that I was going to attend the local Walsh College (now Walsh University) after high school. I explained that I would ride my bike between home and the school, a distance of 1.7 miles. My mother asks how I intend to get there in the winter when the lake effect snow is too deep for bike riding.

“Won’t you drive me?” I asked.

At five years old, I made the decision that I was not going to live in a dorm. This was fueled by my understanding of what a dorm was. My older, wiser brother (he was seven), told me that a dorm was like underneath the deck attached to our house. I was terrified of the area underneath the deck. It was dark, dank, and there were frogs who emerged from there occasionally.

Almost 25 years later, that conversation is laughably ironic and a family favorite in light of my career path, which has included not only living in dorms but also participating in their design.

I love the debates over whether the buildings that house residents are dorms or residence halls. It’s an issue that people in student affairs are extremely passionate about, both sides having endless resources to back up their cause. I’ve believed for a long time that while residence hall may be preferred, dorm is not a dirty word. Dorm happens to be the world that most people know to describe those buildings where learning and living happens 24/7. It is not used with disrespect for the work that we do or what happens on a daily basis.

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Amanda Wallace, of  the University of Alabama, and Anne Stark, from Purdue University, are researching the challenges of advising student groups and the ways a professional advisor can help make the relationship work. If you’ve had experience in this area, please help your colleagues by completing their short, 16-item survey.

Please pass this on to anyone who can assist. There’s always a need for more research in student housing, and this is an easy way to help!

Happy Thursday, folks!

I’ve been getting a flurry of questions about RA hiring, evaluation and supervision lately. It’s RA-recruitment season, after all. Unfortunately, there’s no single resource that covers this topic thoroughly. (Hint, hint, if you’re in the mood to research and write a book or paper.) If you’re not up for that, post your tips and resources here!

One member asked about RA qualifications.  I looked at what others are doing. I searched for institutions who specified RA qualifications on their websites beyond the usual good-GPA-and-good-disciplinary-record stipulation.

Here are a few of them:

Brigham Young
Carnegie Mellon
Kent State University
Carleton College
University of Oregon
University of Montevallo
University of Central Florida
Towson University

I also found some scholarly articles on the topic. Here’s a a sample list of citations:

• Wu, M.B. & Stemler, S.E. (2008) Resident Advisor General Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence, Personality Dimensions, and Internal Belief Characteristics as Predictors of Rated Performance; NASPA Journal (Online). 45 (4); 528-59.

• Servaty-Seib, H. L. & Taub, D. J. (2008) Training Faculty Members and Resident Assistants to Respond to Bereaved Students; New Directions for Student Services 121; 51-62.

• Healea, C.D. (2005) Character Education with Resident Assistants: A model for developing character on college campuses. Journal of Education, 186(1); 65-77.

• Elleven, R. K.; Allen, J. & Wircenski, M. (2001) Resident Assistant Training: A southwestern perspective. College Student Journal, 35 (4); 609-15.

I spent a recent weekend with my partner and his family, including his four-month-old nephew. When we visited my partner’s aunt at her nursing home, I held the baby on my lap and told him stories about the people in his life. I explained to him that Uncle Dan knows everything about computers right now, but it may someday be his job to teach Uncle Dan things as technology advances. I told him about his Aunt Katie, who is an accountant and will teach him about budgeting for college. One by one, I went through the family members.

“And I will teach you everything you need to know about going away to college,” I told him. “If you need me to, I can also teach your mommy and daddy how to send their student away to college and maintain appropriate boundaries.”

His mother laughed, but as I regaled her with stories of parents and grandparents who have contacted me recently, she realized that in seventeen years, my expertise may be needed.

Only a few days later I was on the phone with a local travel agent booking my flights to the ACUHO-I Annual Conference and Exposition. He gathered the information from me he needed to make the reservation, including my department name.

“My nephew is going to school there next year, and is going to live on campus. Any tips I can pass along to him?” he asked. He finished making my reservation while I talked to him about involvement and community. Before we hung up, he thanked me and said, “I had no idea how much living on campus has changed since I was in school.”

As much effort as we put into educating students about residence life, I wonder what institutions are doing to educate parents and families about what we do. On my task list for my summer interns is creating a parent resource for our incoming residents. We have a visible presence at orientation and Welcome Week. But is that enough?

What are your institutions doing to include parents and family in the residential experience?

I’ve gotten several questions about co-ed residence halls and related issues lately. I thought the co-ed issue was a closed case; most institutions have co-ed halls, some don’t (usually because of the institution’s religious underpinnings), and that was that. I was apparently mistaken.

Some institutions are considering going co-ed for the first time. Others are looking for information on existing co-ed halls for administrators or parents. Some are thinking of moving from one form of co-ed (by floor) to another (by wing). Visitation issues have also been the topic of some questions lately. I did a search and found that at West Virginia University, students have been protesting against a rule that bans overnight stays by the opposite sex.

Is this flurry of questions a fluke, or are co-ed arrangements and visitation up for debate? What have you noticed in your professional lives?

Unfortunately for ACUHO-I’s members, researchers seem to think as I did — that the co-ed question is over and done with. There isn’t much recent information on the efficacy of co-ed housing vs. single-sex; wings vs. floors; or strict visitation rules vs. liberal. This may also be because most students live in co-ed housing, so it’s hard to find a control group of students who are otherwise similar, but live in single-sex arrangements. I’ve posted a few sample citations here, along with the authors’ summaries. If you know of good studies I’ve missed, let me know: emily [at] acuho-i.org. Thanks! (more…)

The Yale Daily News posted pictures of student residences in the late 1800s and early 1900s, juxtaposed with current residences. The older photographs are part of an online exhibition curated by the Yale University Art Gallery. Though the black-and-white pictures don’t allow for a lot of detail, one can see well-appointed rooms with fancy rugs, full bookshelves and framed art on the walls.

Some of the present houses don’t compare so well; despite the color they add to the room, liquor bottles arranged along the mantel don’t have the panache of a well-mounted elk head. However, some of the present rooms look like cozy, comfortable spaces.

As we mentioned earlier in this blog, early residence hall rooms weren’t always so plush. At the first meeting of people who would later form ACUHO-I in 1949, housing directors discussed washers and dryers. Some felt a set was only necessary in women’s housing. Some only provided washers, but not dryers, for men. (Many men would have to share one washer.) I’m still puzzling over what the men did with their damp clothes; it doesn’t sound like a good situation to me.

What were the early residences like at your institution?

Ball State University has an emerging media living learning community, which is discussed in this short article. We’re not familiar with any other communities like it. However, there’s probably a lot of unusual living-learning communities out there. The often-seen living-learning communities–those based on a major or profession; ones for freshmen; for honors students–are great support systems for those students. But sometimes an unusual theme for a living-learning community can say a lot about the student, staff or faculty population at a certain institution or the area around it. Do you have an unusual living-learning community? Tell us about it!

Micah Fialka-Feldman, an intellectually disabled student at Oakland University in Rochester, MI, is in a program for students like him; he takes mainstream classes, but uses tutors and other assistants to keep up and complete his coursework. Since he’s a part-time student in a special program, he was not allowed to live on campus. His commute from his parents’ home takes about two hours, and Fialka-Feldman felt he was missing out on campus life. He sued for the right to live in the on-campus residences, and recently found out he won. He’s hoping to move in soon, to begin his last semester at Oakland.

Many institutions limit on-campus housing to full-time students because allowing part-time students to live in campus might lead to other issues: people who are mostly non-students taking advantage of the low rental rates on campus; students with too much free time. However, this sort of policy excludes students such as Fialka-Feldman, who are part-time for other reasons. Students with varying disabilities (diagnosed or otherwise) make managing the living environment more challenging. On the other hand, students who drink too much, who violate the community rules or who avoid participating in community gatherings, also make it harder to nurture a cohesive and safe community. Not all disruptive factors can be controlled, and at what cost? Have you encountered similar issues on your campus? How have you dealt with them?

We get this question all the time, from everyone in the profession, at all levels and all sorts of employ: public, private and companies. Jon and I maintain a list of citations on this topic, updating it several times a year with new articles.

Note: I’ve updated the document, now without the dupes. Thanks to Kevin for pointing them out!

Benefits of OnCampus Housing

As some ACUHO-I members have sent their own children off to college, they have faced the prospect of becoming collegiate “helicopter parents” themselves, and perhaps felt some sympathy for the urge  one has to make sure everything goes well for one’s children as they venture into the world. Pamela Matthews, in an article in Inside HigherEd, says she can relate.