Saint Anselm College fails miserably when it comes to the housing lottery. Students, especially upper classmen, constantly go head-to-head with Residential Life every year.

Residential Life needs to work better with the students and the college needs to offer more housing options for upper classmen.

The housing options for juniors and seniors are either apartments or townhouses, but right now those options are not enough for the huge classes.

Usually the majority of the junior class lives in the apartments in lowers and the majority of the senior class lives in townhouses and apartments in uppers. But this school year that is not the case.

The majority of the junior class is living in sophomore dorms and spread out over campus. Lowers has a few juniors and the rest seniors. This separates these seniors from the rest of their class, isolating them on their last year together. And the juniors are all spread out throughout campus, which is hurting their camaraderie.

The biggest problem the school needs to fix is the buildings for housing. This year Saint Anselm finished the construction of a new dorm building, which is beautiful and updated with wonderful amenities.

But upper classmen do not want to live in a dorm once they reach junior year; they want an apartment where they are able to feel like an adult. Perhaps it would have been a wiser investment to build more townhouses or apartments. Other schools and universities offer apartments to juniors and seniors, which draws more students towards those campuses.

The New Dorm is appealing, but incoming students want to see what they could have when they are older. There is plenty of land behind the townhouses that could be used for more apartments and townhouses. The school needs to consider raising money for new apartments.

The housing lottery is also executed poorly. The lottery is considered to be random, but it should not be. Students who are on academic probation and have been written up or gotten into any sort of trouble should not be getting better lottery numbers than students who have good grades and stay out of trouble.

“I know people on this campus who have been written up by resident advisors and have an apartment in lowers, but I have always stayed out of trouble and I got a lousy lottery number and I’m living in courts,” said junior Hannah Gallucci.

Housing should become an incentive for students. If students stay out of trouble, have good academic standing, and get involved in the extra curriculum activities, then they should have better lottery numbers than those who do not. This should be done especially because there are few students on campus who believe that the lottery is actually random.

The housing lottery causes too much stress for students. This past spring the system was worse than ever. The amount of students that were unhappy with their living situations was astronomical. Students want to live with their classmates and move up in housing from year to year; no student wants to live in the same place as they did the previous year.

Saint Anselm College and Residence Life needs to start accommodating the upperclassmen and making their living situations better. Saint A’s needs to remain competitive with these schools and by updating and changing their housing system it would give them a larger advantage.