UNBC Student housing gears up for a return to in class learning

Student housing is filling up at UNBC as the campus prepares for a full return to in-class learning this fall.

Lisa Haslett, Director of Business Services and Continuing Studies at UNBC says things started to amp up all at once in terms of housing applications.

“It definitely sped up the rates of applications shortly after registration opened so once students understood what their class schedules would look like for the fall whether or not they could get courses fully online or whether or not they were going to be in 100% class,” explained Haslett.

She adds they’re expecting to take a steady flow of applications right into the middle of August.

“I’d say we’re about on par with previous years, we’re maybe falling a little bit behind because our registration didn’t open until a little bit later this year just with the transition to face to face,” explained Haslett.

Haslett notes that while they have had a waiting list for student housing in previous years, the school won’t have a clear idea of what to expect in terms of student housing capacity for another month or so.

Housing will operate pretty regularly in the fall, but currently, there is only a 50% occupancy allowed in the buildings as only 2 students can occupy a 4 bedroom dorm.

“Once we move into the fall we’ll be working with normal student occupancy, except we’ll have a small increase in available emergency suites,” added Haslett.

Emergency suites are used to house students with a roommate conflict, some sort of communicable disease, or if there’s a situation where a student needs to isolate for a period of time.

Housing support programming will also return to normal, with academic support, supplementary social activities, and co-curricular activities running mostly in person, while just a few of the supports will be strictly virtual options.

Additionally, Haslett confirmed that there will be no increase in housing costs associated with the pandemic, only an increase relative to economic inflation.

“There’s been no significant change in cost, normally year-over-year we see an increase at about the rate of inflation so around 2% that’s normal this year, a slight increase related to last year but nothing related to Covid,” she added.