Housing Concerns in the Age of Speed

The Speed Scholarship raised questions about MC's resources. Res Life responds.

Ratliff Hall, like other residence halls, has been a hotbed of renovation & rearrangement in preparation for MC’s ever-growing freshman classes. (Photo Credit: Logan Orman)

With the initiation of the Speed Scholarship in 2023, Mississippi College freshman class sizes have gradually increased, resulting in the current freshman class being the largest MC has ever seen. The question is: does Mississippi College have enough housing for its growing student body?

The short answer is yes. In fact, many students thought it was new students who had yet to be placed, but this was a misconception.

“The majority of the students on the waiting list were returning students who didn't do housing sign-up on time,” said Kasia Twiner, Assistant Director of Residence Life. “There were a couple of transfers, but we had very minimal freshmen in all of this.”

At the beginning of the school year, MC had 481 students on the housing waitlist. While it's typical for students to drop out or transfer at the last minute, by the end of the first week of classes, all but one student on the waitlist had been assigned housing; the remaining student was placed in the second week.

Many students were concerned that MC was biting off more than it could chew when it announced it would no longer offer College Plaza as a housing option. Wouldn’t more students mean more housing is necessary? In February, MC announced that it would be ending its partnership with College Plaza apartments in May. However, the original contract stated that MC had to pay for every apartment not leased within a sixth month period. This allowed MC to move students in for one last semester.

“The best way to explain it is we use [College Plaza] for overflow housing,” Twiner said. “We ended up being able to get all the people off of the waiting list… We were very adamant about not wanting to put freshmen out there because it's part of the freshman experience to be on campus.”

The Office of Residence Life, the Dean of Students, and the Admissions Office work in tandem through the admissions and housing process for the upcoming school year. Admissions knows exactly how many students it can admit without exceeding the amount of beds MC has to offer. The past few years have seen several changes to housing. Ratliff, Hederman, and Gunter residence halls have been refurbished and reopened to accommodate for the numbers. In addition, male, female, freshman and upperclassmen dormitories have been frequently swapped.  It is a moving puzzle deciding where to place students every year.

“We're trying to get to a place where we know ahead of time how many new students we can take,” Twiner said. “There's been a lot of swapping around in the last couple of years to accommodate the bigger freshman classes and to figure out the best configuration to fit them closest to each other and all that. Our goal is that for the future, we would do less flipping.”