Before starting his first year at the University of Maine, 18-year-old Ryan Smyth learned he and his roommate would have a third person living with them in an Oxford Hall room built for two.
“We were kind of taken aback,” the mechanical engineering student said.
The roommates have made things work with bunk beds and creative furniture arrangements. But recent bumps in enrollment at Maine universities and community colleges and the ongoing housing crisis have pushed students to max out on-campus housing. Schools have converted rooms, rented hotel space and partnered with landlords for subsidized options.
It might seem like the solution is to build more dormitories. But it’s not that simple, administrators say. Increased enrollment and inflated need for rooms may either be an aberration or the beginning of a trend. Regionally, college enrollment is expected to decrease in coming years. High housing costs in the Bangor and Portland regions could keep that down.
“You can’t look at the UMaine numbers this year and say, ‘Let’s go do a groundbreaking and build a $35 million dorm because we had 200 more students this year than we’ve had the last couple of years,’” Ryan Low, the University of Maine system’s finance chief, said.
UMaine has commissioned a $400,000 study of its housing stock. Results will come next month. The study will examine the Orono dorms, which have an average age of 64 years, and how to best approach housing in the post-COVID era.
Kelly Sparks, UMaine’s chief business officer who oversees housing, anticipates having to renovate or rebuild many buildings. That also has implications for colleges. It may make sense to assess things before building new, but construction costs are expected to keep climbing. Students will either have to make do with the current options or pay more for new ones.
“The question is: Can we deliver a product to them at a price that they’re able to pay?” Sparks said.
At community colleges, housing options are also squeezed. A program championed by Gov. Janet Mills that guaranteed free community college to Maine high school graduates took effect in 2022, prompting a 12 percent enrollment bump. Campuses in South Portland, Wells and other places affected by the housing crunch built new dorms or rented rooms in hotels.
But it is less common for students to live at these two-year colleges, where the average age is 24 and many never consider on-campus living, noted system spokesperson Noel Gallagher.
For four-year colleges like UMaine that have a first-year residency requirement, housing all students is a necessity. The Orono college is also in a particular bind.
To address two years of lower occupancy and afford upperclassmen more living space, the college converted nearly 200 doubles into singles in preparation for this academic year. Then enrollment spiked. Now, 137 students like Smyth are living in triples, quads or lounges until a more suitable space can be found for them.
“We’ve been able to house all of our first-years on campus at this point, and I will acknowledge not always in their ideal situation, but they are on campus,” Sparks said.
At UMaine and other schools, it has long been a rite of passage for upperclassmen to move off campus after their first or second years. But high rents in the community have pushed more of them — along with graduate students — to request on-campus housing. Thirty students are in an on-campus hotel or in off-site apartments leased to upperclassmen at the UMaine rate.
For some students, like Smyth and fellow classmate Matthew Child, 19, the crunch has worked out fine. Child is living in a converted student lounge in Oxford Hall with three other students. Each of them has plenty of space and privacy.
For others, including Avery Donschikowski, it’s enough to get them to transfer. Like Smyth, Donschikowski, 18, was placed in a triple in Oxford Hall weeks before school started. She’s been having trouble with a roommate, but she can’t leave because UMaine is overcrowded.
“I am so unhappy there that I am only there at night and when I wake up, unless I manage to sleep elsewhere,” she said.
