While incoming freshmen scrambled to gather their new supplies for college this summer, the Hopkins Office of Housing and Dining was doing some scrambling of its own.
After miscalculations of how much the economy would affect enrollment numbers, the incoming freshman class is 119 students larger than the Office of Admissions's original goal.
The admissions department uses a model each year to estimate how many students offered admission would enroll. This model weighs different factors, including prospective students' gender, intended major and state of residence. The model gives the percentage, based on previous years, of how many students from each category are likely to accept.
"In the past, [the model] has been very reliable," Dean of Enrollment and Academic Services Bill Conley said.
"The problem is that it can't account for what hasn't happened before. The economic situation was obviously nothing we could statistically put into the model. We had to interpret as best we could what we thought would happen and how it would affect the yield."
Using personal inference in addition to the model, the admissions department admitted 4,300 freshmen out of an applicant pool of about 16,223.
By admitting an extra 150 to 200 students from previous years, the admissions department hoped to enroll 1,205 freshmen and then admit from the wait-list to achieve the target of 1,235 students.
In early May, when final decisions from incoming freshman were made, the admissions department started to realize that they had the potential to over-enroll by 130-140 people. However, at the move in date, the freshman class was only 1,354 students.
"We knew on May 15 that we were going to be over-enrolled so we did a lot of work over the summer to accommodate," Conley said.
This year, there are 1,339 freshmen in university housing, 117 higher than last year's 1,222 students.
To create more space for these students, the housing department leased the Hopkins Inn, which currently houses 61 freshman and two resident advisors (RAs).
Additionally, the Rodgers House has been reopened and houses sophomores that participated in group housing last year.
These sophomores would have lived in McCoy, which now houses 66 freshmen. In the AMRs, staff members volunteered to give up their offices to create more bed space.
"It was a challenging summer. It took a lot of people and planning and implementing to make it work," Tracey Angel, Director of Housing and Conference Services, said.
"I think people are pretty happy with how things have turned out. We have not had many complaints in terms of triples. We're doing what we can to make sure people are content and satisfied with their housing."
At the start of this year, there were 29 students in triples- significantly lower than the 45 students estimated to reside in triples at the end of last spring. As space opens up, students in triples are consistently given the option to move.
Last year, the Housing department started with 41 triples and decreased this number to 34.
Carol Mohr, Senior Director of Housing and Dining Services, said in an email, "We opened this year with fewer triple rooms than we have had in the past three years."
Triples, according to the Housing Department, are converted from the largest double rooms to fit the need of the student body. There are no rooms at Hopkins that are designed to house three students.
Despite the larger freshman class, move-in procedures still ran smoothly. The only difference from last year, according to Stephanie Shiau, the Orientation Executive Chair, was that the Hopkins Inn had to be moved in as well.
Having more upperclassmen than last year helped the process. "We had a lot more Orientation Assistants sign up this year. We didn't actively recruit for more, we just happened to have more," Shiau said.
Financially, students who are in triples past the first month of school pay about $1,000 less than the rate for students housed in doubles. Additionally, students living in Hopkins Inn this year are not paying more than students in other residence halls.
"The cost of University housing has not changed based on this incoming class. Though there was certainly cost involved in preparing Rogers and converting and offering the Hopkins Inn as freshmen housing," Mohr said. "[However] it will not leave Hopkins in the red."
To prevent an over-enrollment from occurring again in the future, Conley has been working to improve the prediction model. By importing this year's statistics, the enrollment staff analyze of who ended up enrolling and look at how their behavior differed from the previous model.
"We think this will still be an issue we have to account for when we admit the class of 2014 but the analysis were doing right now should help us come up with a better guess of what impact its going to have on various students," he said.
In the past eight years of Conley's career, over-enrollment occurred only once, in 2005. This smaller scale over-enrollment was by only 50 to 60 students.
"Our numbers are the same despite the increase in number of freshmen," Sally Fickau, Director of Residental Life said. "We have the same number of residents per RA."
In addition, the Greek Exemption, which allows sophomores to live off campus in fraternity houses, was overturned last year.
"Typically 15 to 20 sophomores total [would exempt housing], and on a big year, maybe 25 to 30," Rob Turning, Director of Greek Life said of the exemption, which was not reinstated despite the shortage in freshman housing.
