The University of Missouri will rent dorm rooms to football weekend visitors this fall as it seeks to recoup some of the $5 million it will spend to keep seven residence halls idle.
Dropping enrollment means only about 4,000 incoming freshmen are expected to enroll in August, down from 6,419 in the fall of 2015. The university has closed seven residence halls with 1,461 beds.
During the UM Board of Curators meeting Thursday, MU Vice Chancellor for Operations Gary Ward said a website is available for people to reserve two-bedroom, four-bed suites for $120 a night. Parking is extra.
The university has other ideas for using the dorms, including guest housing during conferences and the Aug. 21 total solar eclipse and opening earlier in August so students can move in before the school year starts. The cost of keeping an idle building includes utilities and maintenance personnel for landscaping and other needs.
Overnight guests will pay taxes on their rooms although whether it will be equal to current room taxes was unclear. Ward said he doesn’t expect area hotels to complain about competition.
“My understanding, and this would have to be verified with them, is the hotels are full anyway, so we won’t be competing on game days,” Ward said in an interview. “We could be competing with out-of-town hotels.”
Steve Bales, president of the Columbia Hospitality Association, could not be reached for comment on the plan. Amy Schneider, director of the Columbia Convention and Visitors Bureau, said she had heard about the plan but had not heard the details. The bureau is funded wholly from room taxes paid by Columbia hotels.
“I will probably have hotels contact me and talk to me,” she said. “I’ll need to contact Gary Ward to get more info and talk to city hall and see what they know about it, to see what can and can’t be done.”
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Ward revealed the plan for renting dorm rooms as he updated the curators on the master plan for buildings on the Columbia campus. The university wants to consolidate space and determine whether it should demolish or completely renovate buildings where maintenance needs are greater than 40 percent of the replacement cost, he said.
The university has been allowing maintenance needs to grow, Ward said. The current backlog is $748 million, an amount that is increasing by $35 million per year, he said. A survey of campus education and general use buildings identified 41 buildings with more than 2 million square feet of space that are above the 40 percent threshold.
Part of the plan is to convert Schurz Hall, the largest unused dorm with 530 beds, to education use, he said. That would shift the $1.67 million cost of keeping the building in good shape while it is unused from residential life to the budget supported by tuition and state revenue.
Respect Hall, with rooms for 147 beds, will be used by the Human Environmental Science Extension, and Responsibility, with rooms for 184 beds, will be assigned to MU Health Care, Ward said.
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The plans for converting each building must be approved by the curators, Ward said.
As the university grew from about 23,000 students in the early 2000s to 35,448 in 2015, MU spent heavily to build new dorms and renovate old residence halls. Even with the construction the university had more students than it had beds and did not enforce the requirement that freshmen live on campus, Ward said.
Some MU dorm rooms will be rented out on football weekends this fall.
Now, even with the idled beds, there are about 1,000 more beds available in residence halls than incoming freshmen. The university is going to start marketing campus housing to sophomores, transfer students and others. And to combat marketing from private student housing, MU will emphasize benefits that include housing students with common interests in adjoining rooms and results that include higher retention and graduation rates for students who live on campus.
“We have never marketed to returning students, we have always marketed to the freshman class,” Ward said.
The marketing will also tout the convenience of living on campus. To make it more attractive, the requirement that students purchase a meal plan for the year will be dropped, Ward said.
The goal is to increase the number of students living on campus by 3 percent per year until the residence halls, not including those currently idle, are full again, Ward said. If the growth goal is met, the residence halls will be full again in the 2021 school year, he said.
With some off-campus landlords offering to buy out student housing contracts, the university is considering its options.
Fully enforcing the on-campus housing requirement for freshmen is a last resort, Ward said.
“We are having a discussion about that now, about what do we do,” he said. “We have never done that before. What we really want to do is not go that direction. We really want to show the benefits.”
COLUMBIA TRIBUNE
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Dropping enrollment means only about 4,000 incoming freshmen are expected to enroll at MU in August, down from 6,419 in the fall of 2015. The university has closed seven residence halls with 1,461 beds.
“My understanding, and this would have to be verified with them, is the hotels are full anyway, so we won’t be competing on game days. We could be competing with out-of-town hotels.”
– MU VICE CHANCELLOR FOR OPERATIONS GARY WARD