Students living on campus for the fall 2026 semester likely won’t be living in a single room, a noticeable change reflected in the preferences of the application’s first half, which opened in October.
Following an increase in on-campus housing occupancy for the current academic year, Residential Life expects more students to live on campus next fall, Kayla Smith Landgren, director of Residential Life, told The Bulletin. Enrollment is projected to increase, which means there will be more incoming students required to live on campus among those who choose to.
In preparation for that increase in enrollment, the option for students to live alone in any of the three residence halls—Towers Complex, Abigail Morse and Schallenkamp Hall—was removed.
“For that transparency piece, I don’t want anybody to complete the first part of the application, preference a single and plan on that when we might not be able to provide that,” said Smith Landgren.
In year’s past, Residential Life has focused on filling room spaces when occupancy hasn’t been met to fill all available beds. So, while the goal is to “fill all the beds,” rooms that are meant for two students have sometimes been turned into single-person living spaces. That remained the case this year.
“We are pretty much using all of our rooms right now except for two small floors we aren’t using, but everything else is pretty full,” said Smith Landgren. “We don’t have open rooms here or there, and that’s with modified occupancy, where we’ve taken some double rooms and turned them into single rooms.”
The option for a single room likely won’t return once the second part of the housing application opens in the spring, at which point students sign the terms of living on campus and confirm their placement.
It’s a matter of available space. Residential Life has around 500 rooms between all of its residence halls and anticipates being at full occupancy for the 2026-27 academic year plus necessary modifications. The 20-day resident occupancy for fall 2025 was 744, and the number of residents currently living in campus housing could sit more around the 933 mark, Smith Landgren said.
“That doesn’t leave a ton of wiggle room,” she said. “But we’re even looking at some of those single rooms that just had one bed … to make those double rooms to allow for that flexibility too, and to ensure that we can accommodate everyone who is required to live on campus.”
But single rooms are not going away completely. Resident assistants will still receive a single room and an allotted number of single rooms exist for students who need living accommodations. Those accommodations are determined by Student Accessibility and Support Services, not Residential Life.
“Occupancy and building management is an ongoing thing,” said Smith Landgren. “So we’re looking at the numbers all the time, and that goes until students get here in August … to me, these decisions are never a one time thing. We’re continually looking at the numbers, shifting when we need to, adjusting when we need to. I just don’t want to be in a situation where we’re committing to something that we can’t uphold.”
In deciding whether or not to return to campus housing, Smith Landgren says students will “make a decision that’s best for them” after evaluating their options. In light of the changes, she encourages students to be “open to the experience” of a roommate and a shared living space.
“I think there can be a lot of benefits to having a roommate, and those experiences together and memories that could develop there,” she said.
