More than a place to sleep
A college education isn't limited to the classroom. At Carolina, there are plenty of learning opportunities in the residence halls, too.
Check out any student residence hall built in the past 10 years or so, and it will be obvious that today's students aren't exactly roughing it.
Hall bathrooms? Won't find them. Cinder block walls and built-in metal furniture? Gone the way of rotary dial phones. In their place are private bedrooms, bathrooms built for two—not 32—and living rooms with nicely appointed furniture and eat-in kitchenettes.
Those amenities, which describe Carolina's most recently built residence halls, reflect the expectations of college students across the nation who don't want to live in their parents' old dormitories. But the real changes in student housing go far beyond design and architecture. “In the 1980s, a conversation began on campuses everywhere about living and learning,” said Gene Luna, associate vice president for student affairs at Carolina. “We started looking beyond the buildings themselves to what was happening inside.”
Student housing administrators realized that with the right programs and policies, the experience of living on campus could help students to mature, develop academic skills for success, and graduate faster.
“First things first, they're here to succeed academically and get their degree, and student housing should be an active supporter of that goal—not just a place to sleep,” said Tim Coley, director of University housing at Carolina.
So what does that philosophy look like in action? At Carolina, it's a safety net designed to keep students—especially freshmen—from falling through the cracks. The “net” includes:
- residence advisors, who do more than serve as behavior police. At Carolina, they're trained to have significant conversations with each freshman on their floor at least four times per year to make sure their younger charges aren't sinking and pointing them to the right resources if they are.
- Academic Centers of Excellence (ACE), which are located in three residence halls and offer academic success coaching and free tutoring in math and writing from graduate
students. The centers are coordinated with the University's new Student Success Center in the Thomas Cooper Library.
- academic interventions at the beginning of spring semesters in which residence life professionals meet confidentially with students who had academic problems in the fall term. Students are connected with appropriate academic support services.
- classrooms in eight residence halls are used to teach more than 80 sections of undergraduate and graduate courses.
The idea is that students will associate their residence halls with academic pursuits, not just watching TV and sleeping.Carolina's student housing administrators are taking the living/learning concept a step further with a growing list of learning communities sprinkled across campus. Want to immerse yourself in French culture and language? The French House, at 820 Henderson St., accommodates 24 students who do that every day. Is engineering your thing? A special wing of Bates House has 50 engineering students who take engineering-related field trips together and rub elbows with engineering faculty on a regular basis.
Pre-law students can room together on a designated wing in McBryde; ditto for pre-med students. There's also a Spanish House, a music wing, a green learning community in West Quad, and a wing in Patterson for future teachers.
On the horizon is a plan to convert the 190-bed Maxcy residence hall into a language house, with different languages on each wing and floor. Maxcy is currently a dorm for Honors College freshmen. In 2009, a new and larger residence hall for Honors College freshmen and sophomores will open on the site of the now-demolished Towers.
Which brings us back to the changing architecture of student housing. Unlike the 1960s-era Towers—which featured hall bathrooms and spartan cell-like rooms—the new honors residence hall will have bedrooms for single and double occupancy, bathrooms shared by two or three, and common living areas shared by 10–12 students.
These small groupings of students are designed to help students connect, build a sense of community, and nurture the development of citizenship beyond graduation. Lofty goals, to be sure, but student housing—particularly at Carolina—isn't your grandfather's old dormitory anymore.
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