UC Merced moves start date for in-person classes amid drastic shortage of student housing
UC Merced officials say they are delaying in-person classes for five days in order to help give students more time to find lodging due to a significant local housing shortage.
The announcement came Tuesday evening with in-person classes slated to begin Aug. 30. Classes already scheduled for online will begin Aug. 25, the fall semester’s official start date.
“This delay in physical course attendance will allow time to situate our students into late housing assignments,” an email from UC Merced to its campus community said Tuesday.
The upcoming school year was recently upset when university officials realized Merced’s long-standing housing difficulties would be exacerbated by construction delays for Merced Station, an off-campus housing development geared toward students.
The delay in available units for about 500 UC Merced students who planned to live at Merced Station joined the ranks of around 500 other students who are still looking for housing for a variety of reasons.
The situation happened on the cusp of a new and largely in-person academic year just a few weeks away.
UC Merced officials sought approval from the academic senate to postpone in-person instruction due to the roughly 1,000 students who have yet to secure local housing.
Delaying in-person instruction is not anticipated to impact the schedule of the rest of the fall semester or academic calendar, according to university officials.
Other measures being taken
University officials first caught inklings of the increased housing challenge over the summer, UC Merced Vice Chancellor of student affairs Charles Nies told the Sun-Star.
While UC Merced officials anticipated that students going into their second year would be interested in living on campus after many were entirely remote-learners last year, it was when juniors and seniors came on the wait list that officials realized students across the board were all struggling to find a place to live.
“We started to recognize in the summer, as our wait list for on campus housing started to increase, that our students were struggling find off campus rentals,” Nies said.
Then, officials learned last week that Merced Station wouldn’t be ready for students to live in before the fall semester is slated to start. “We did not learn about that in advance,” Nies said.
Over 500 students with leases at Merced Station will be provided beds at local hotels until they are able to move into their apartments, which are expected to become available in mid to late September, the statement said.
UC Merced has also reserved contingency hotel beds in case more housing is needed. Transportation would be provided for students housed in hotels, according to the statement.
Plus, the university is adding approximately 700 beds to new on-campus dorms that were designed for triple occupancy but are currently set up below capacity for only two students. Additional furniture is being acquired to make these residence halls suitable for at-capacity occupancy.
A campus announcement on Sunday stated that officials gave UC Merced the green light to open more on-campus housing to accommodate a “great majority” of undergraduate students impacted by disruptions to their housing plans.
Campus residency is being offered first to students who had earlier applied to live on campus.
With Merced’s low vacancy rate, housing difficulties are not new to Merced’s student and non-student residents alike. “Merced as a community doesn’t have a large (housing) stock, particularly of apartments,” Nies said.
The developers behind Merced Station have said that they hope it will ameliorate the issue of UC Merced’s growing student population outpacing available housing — an issue underscored by the current challenge.
Nies said this year’s hurdles were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many students did not live in the Merced area over the past academic year while remote learning was the teaching standard. Then, students moved to Merced in search of apartments at the same time.
“Our students all left, and they all came back at the same time,” Nies said. “I think that put a demand on the housing market that there historically hasn’t been.”
This story was originally published August 18, 2021 at 8:12 AM.
