As higher education enrollment becomes more challenging to predict, creating a stronger relationship between housing and admissions becomes more critical. Here’s how some campuses are making it work.
Interview By Mallory Sidarous
In a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education discussing residence hall amenities, an architect recalled how campuses claim that “We don’t want our housing to be the reason that a student chooses to attend our institution. We also do not want our housing to be the reason that they choose not to attend our institution. That’s the sweet spot that we’re usually trying to navigate.”
That balancing act, in many ways, sums up the relationship between campus housing and admissions departments. They are interdependent, each department supporting the other, neither one serving as the cart or the horse. When the Talking Stick pulled together a group of housing professionals to discuss how their department works with admissions, much of the conversation focused on operational aspects – promoting housing options, sharing reports, making projections, and the like – but it quickly became apparent that underlying all those tasks and meetings was a shared goal of maximizing the student experience starting even before that student has applied.
Sharing their experiences were Mannix Clark, associate director of administrative services and operations at the University of Minnesota; Abigail Rodgers, coordinator of business operations at Auburn University; Tim Albert, associate director of housing and residence life at Seattle University; and Jneanne Hacker, executive director of housing and residence life, and Johnna Matulja, director of business operations, both from Ohio University.
The conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
Mallory Sidarous: Thank you all for being here today. The timing is good, as here at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville we have a new vice chancellor of enrollment management. In a lot of ways, it's a breath of fresh air. It's really reassuring to have partners who get housing's impact on the student experience and the recruitment piece. For us, a valuable part of that partnership is their understanding of how housing influences a student’s decision. So I thought a good place to start would be to talk about strategies you have to maintain that positive relationship.
Johnna Matulja: At Ohio University, in 2012 or maybe 2013, we were approached by admissions to help create a unique experience to showcase our housing opportunities. A big piece of this is that we have a two-year housing requirement, and it's very strict. Very few exemptions are approved. We created a housing ambassador program and, for the first few years, utilized student volunteers who showed their rooms and talked about their housing experience. It was a great and wonderful experiment that I am so grateful we went through (though I don't necessarily want to ever go through it again). It was hard to create opportunities for students to talk about their experience within their room, show what a great housing experience looks like, and be able to nuance those conversations between the students and the parents. We wanted to make sure we were putting our best foot forward.
To move forward, we first hired a graduate assistant who then hired what we now call our housing ambassadors; they showcased their spaces not as volunteers but as employees. For 2025-26, we are pulling our housing ambassadors and our office assistants (the students who work with our keys and lockouts) together. All those students will facilitate admissions events and admissions showcase days where we can talk about the student experiences through the lens of recruitment. The showcased space we set aside is no longer a true student room; it is unoccupied but set up to look authentic. Doing this has created some consistency over the course of the program and keeps those students engaged with us throughout the year.
Sidarous: Housing ambassador programs are a great example of how housing units and enrollment management work together to impact the student recruitment experience. Would somebody else be willing to share how their housing ambassador program works?
Abigail Rodgers: We are like Ohio, but also a little bit different. When I first came on staff, several students volunteered to showcase their rooms, but after the first or second year, we started doing this ourselves. We took a room or a suite offline and just ate the cost. We were able to market it a lot better by setting up and decorating the room as a way of showing students how they could transform the space.
Our housing ambassadors are in the office, and they answer our departmental phone and email. They help patrons when they come into the office and conduct all our housing tours. We try to give a tour of every single one of our communities throughout the day, and that is about six of our housing areas right now.
Something unique to Auburn is that we do not have a live-on requirement for anyone, including first-year students. We simply do not have enough beds on campus: not enough to house the first-year class, much less all the students seeking housing. That is how much enrollment has gone up.
Sidarous: In both those cases, you provided examples of how your student ambassadors fill the role as a student employee and are getting that student development experience. As housing and student affairs professionals, we are proud of that development. Creating and expanding opportunities for student employment outside a traditional resident assistant role or desk job is a neat way to leverage those relationships and those partnerships.
Tim Albert: For us, the students showing their rooms went a little bit away during the pandemic because they really were very uncertain about having people in their spaces. Since then, we've been showing an empty room, but we can’t afford to do that the whole year because we need the space. We’ve been shifting things around so that whenever we have our admitted student days, my assistant director, who handles assignments, can find us about eight different rooms. Luckily, a lot of times, our student-athletes are the volunteers, so we have rooms in at least all our traditional halls. Our hope for next year is to go back to having at least a few dedicated showrooms that students are living in. We are still trying to figure out whether those students would work for housing or admissions.
Sidarous: In our partnership with admissions, we have an understanding that housing is part of the general campus tour. The tour ambassadors, who work for admissions, are trained to showcase these spaces. The daily campus tours are managed by the admissions office, and that includes seeing our spaces. On admitted student days, we kick up our housing efforts so we can show multiple spaces and can get more students and families through. There are times when housing departments are managing their housing ambassadors, and the housing part of the experience may look separate. And then there are other times when it's really integrated into the campus tour experience, which is a little bit more of our model here at Edwardsville.
Jneanne Hacker: I wanted to add that I think the work we do is critically important to helping students see themselves as part of the campus experience from the beginning. Students are seeking institutions of higher education based on the premier academic programs they offer, but the campus experience is equally important.
I always share with my team that 15% of the work we do is outlined in our job description, but 85% is building those working relationships that are critically important to our success. Our partnership with admissions is extremely valuable. Admissions and housing work as extensions of each other to ensure that we align our strategies to meet the university's priority of enrolling students. As we all continue to compete for a declining number of graduating high school seniors, it's going to become more critical to work together to showcase the value of a campus experience and how that translates to student success.
We value our two-year live-on requirement. I know some may question it, but all our research and data suggest that students who reside on campus for two whole years are more connected in the halls and more engaged in campus activities, organizations, and resources – and these things have a positive impact on student retention. Here at Ohio, we've actually celebrated two consecutive years of our highest enrollment levels.
Mannix Clark: The only thing I would add is that we make sure our tours show all our buildings because our campus is fairly spread out over two separate cities. We want to make sure they see multiple buildings so they're not tied to only wanting the newer ones. There are a lot of things we have worked out with admissions in the past to make sure students get a wide experience.
Sidarous: One of the things that popped into my head is that sometimes there's a conflict of the enrollment management and admissions departments selling the institution and, depending on the landscape of your institution, they may be talking about the affordability of your institution. But they also want there to be facilities that are attractive. I thought it would be nice for us to talk about these relationships and what that conversation is like.
Albert: I would say that is less of a conflict I have with admissions and probably more with our finance folks. I think that with some of our amenities, particularly in our traditional halls, we do better than a lot of other schools. That, in some ways, makes it easier for admissions to go out and sell. Not that everything in our traditional halls is perfect or anything like that, but our price point is better than that of some of our peer institutions. Admissions and housing are probably more aligned on that.
Matulja: I think one of the things that Ohio has been able to do really well in conjunction with admissions is to look carefully at our entire portfolio. We have 36 residence halls: many small ones and a few very large ones. But as we're looking at those, we have also been building new halls and making minor renovations that improve the student experience. So as much as we are actually building right now — 591 new beds on our South Green — we have done some complete gutting of our older residential facilities to really upgrade them. That means new drywall and complete renovations with a lot of cosmetics and bathroom renovations to support that student recruitment and retention. When we think about student accessibility, or gender-inclusive housing, or whatever we can do regarding single-use restrooms and those pieces, we know that we're opening up the door as much as possible to as many students as possible.
Ohio University has collaborated well with our facilities team, our capital planning team, and admissions to develop a housing master plan that incorporates all those different pieces. That is Jneanne's wheelhouse, so I'm going to toss it over to her.
Hacker: I do think single-use restrooms and the lobby renovations we have already done have made a big difference, without even touching individual rooms. Those are still concrete and beds. But we know that's not what makes Ohio home; it’s the engagement spaces, the lounges. When we can get a kitchen in there and update the restrooms, especially the single-use ones, we know we're really supporting our students and helping in recruitment endeavors.
Sidarous: That's a great example of a situation that involved some feedback from your admissions partners, and those things influence some of the master planning.
Hacker: To complement what Jhonna said, affordability is always our priority. We have regular conversations with executive leadership about where we need our price position to be (both with tuition and room-and-board) to ensure that we have a level of student affordability and access. We benchmark with our peers – four-year publics across the state – to ensure that our percentage increase recommendations align with the midpoint for room-and-board based on a traditional double and our standard 14-meal plan. As we make those recommendations to our board of trustees, we also want to be sure that we can meet other priorities. As Jhonna said, we have a six-year housing master plan where we're constructing 591 new beds for $110 million, which we will be fully financially responsible for paying through our margin and debt service. We have four halls that will come offline for major renovations, and those will continue to enhance the student experience. Additionally, at Ohio University, we contribute 15.5% of our revenue as a contribution margin or overhead back to the university for other priorities, which is significantly higher than many institutions we have benchmarked with.
In addition, we allocate $14.4 million back to the financial aid office for scholarship students who are interested in attending Ohio University. And that doesn't capture our direct allocations, the $4.8 million that we direct-fund for custodial services and the $2 million that we fund for other essential departments like campus police and mail services, so it is a partnership. It is a conversation.
We want to be sensitive to price position and affordability through the lens of our students and parents. We also want to continue meeting university priorities and maintaining a healthy fund balance so we can continue advancing our housing master plan to enhance our residential portfolio, which we can never do quickly enough, given the scope of our buildings.
Rodgers: I would piggyback off of that. We are in the same line as Ohio. We are not really changing floor plans or anything, but we have been taking some halls offline during the academic year and doing some renovations in our quad community, which is in the central part of campus and includes our oldest halls. They're from the 1940s. We’ve made significant upgrades to the HVAC system, which used to be a pipe with hot water that had to be manually flipped. It wasn't good, especially in the South, where you can start out the day at 40 degrees, and it warms all the way up to 80. It just doesn't work well. We are slowly renovating those buildings and getting the HVAC units up to speed with the modern day.
In one of our other areas, we are upgrading a little bit of the HVAC, but the renovations are mostly cosmetic, like what students see in the lobbies and in the rooms: flooring and some of the cabinets in suites’ common spaces. We are also in the process of building a new residence hall that will open in the fall of 2026. It's more like a traditional set-up where the resident shares the room with a roommate and the bathroom is shared by two rooms. But now we are locating sinks in public spaces, while showers and commodes are behind a door to hopefully overcome those roommate concerns. That’s a way we're catering to the needs of the students to some extent and trying to attract people to campus, since it’s a harder sale if they have to share that much of their space with someone else.
Regarding the financial piece, last year we integrated a fee waiver into our housing application process because if our admissions office waives the fee, then we can waive our application fee as well. Instead, since we don't have enough housing on campus, we require students to make a prepayment by May 1 to confirm that they want to live on campus. It’s the same deadline admissions has for their enrollment deposit. If they don't submit that to our office, we will drop them from their booking and then work to fill those spaces with our standby students. Last year, there were more than a thousand students on standby. We did this because, in the past, students would have to reach out to us and have that awkward conversation to say they thought they had a fee waiver in the system and ask us to check on it. We wanted to streamline that.
Once the student has everything solidified with admissions, I send a weekly report explaining that these students are populating in our system as accepted, but we haven't issued them a time slot, so I check to see if I can I send them their notification and if any of them are eligible for a fee waiver. Once they send the list back to us, we'll issue those time slots, but then we will also put a custom field on the student that bypasses both of those fees so that it's immediate. They don't have to reach out to anyone else. Hopefully we've taken down that barrier for those students.
Matulja: One of the pieces for Ohio University that's different from other institutions is that our housing deposit serves as the student’s declared intent to enroll. We don't have an admissions deposit. That means a big chunk of our collaboration with admissions is related to all of those first-year communications because, after they are accepted, the next step all students must do is complete a housing contract or a commuter exemption.
Albert: We do the opposite. We used to collect a housing deposit through admissions, but do not any longer. Now, they do an enrollment deposit, and our department gave up the housing deposit. One of my great joys in life is that we no longer have to track that.
Sidarous: That goes right into my next question. Regarding the process piece (the deposits, the timeline, when you need to know things, etc.), those strategies have a lot of impact. If we will be short beds, those timelines mean a lot because I need to know if I can assign that bed to someone else. Sharing that information allows us to optimize housing beds but also optimize classroom spaces and make sure folks are at orientation. Does anyone want to share how those deadline and process-driven items happen in partnership with our friends in admissions?
Clark: We in housing, myself along with a couple of my colleagues, have two different committees that we sit on with admissions. In our marketing and communication committee, our marketing communication team meets with admissions’ marketing communication team to work on that process because some communications they send for us and others we send ourselves. That’s because at Minnesota, we allow students to apply for housing prior to them being admitted; they only have to apply for admissions prior to applying for housing.
We also have a yield team, which consists of several people from our admissions area: the people who do their data analysis, as well as the director of admissions, their transfer admissions person, and their freshman admissions person. Plus, there are people from financial aid and the orientation and transition experience. We start those meetings in November to look at all the touchpoints in those areas to see where the class is coming in. We have a place where all of us feed our data so we can see where we were last year in all those touchpoints. This is also where we communicate if we make changes to housing, like adding new learning communities or we’re going to get rid of cable television. We tell them ahead of time so they can adjust as they are out recruiting.
We have had the yield group for about seven or eight years in this current format. It has really been helpful because we know on the front end if they're running ahead or behind on numbers, and then that helps us know how to proceed. Because, like Auburn, we don't require students to live on campus. This past year, we were full. We had a couple of years after the pandemic where we probably were 97% full, but we were back over 100% when we opened this past fall. Then, next year, we're actually taking away a building. When you're full and take away a building, that's even more of an issue. We want to make sure we work with our admissions colleagues and understand how they spin that for us when they do outreach.
Sidarous: I love that yield team idea besides just the initial recruitment because (especially for those major things like taking down a hall) it can change the conversation from, “If you apply by May 1, you'll definitely have a space to live” to “When you're ready to commit, please make that decision as soon as possible.” That really ties into your processes and how you prioritize assignments or when people get to select. And whenever you're working in an environment where you're almost always going to be full, there is the question of how equity fits into that. I love that integrated dialogue.
Albert: Admissions has given me access to a live report, so I have the same data that they have. What's nice for me is that I can see everything from applications to confirmations and deposits. It's this day compared to last year, two years ago, or three years ago. Are we up or down on everything? What’s the university’s goal? Then we have a yield team internally for housing.
The piece I always look at is the demographic shifts because I always want to know the changes. For example, our students are often more local, so maybe more of them will request a housing exemption from our two-year live-on requirement. Or maybe they have fewer financial resources. It's basically that combination of being local and having fewer financial resources that makes it possible to project which students are more likely to request staying at home.
The other one would be if we were to get a class where more of the first-years are older than 21 or something like that; it's these shifting demographics that can impact housing. Honestly, most of the shifts are so slight year to year that it doesn't. But we track it because over maybe a 5- or 10-year period, there are shifts, and we can see that we have had a somewhat significant shift in our student population that has had a big impact on housing.
The other thing that the admissions team has done is help us connect our systems so that, for example, if a student withdraws, it shows up in our system in real time so my assignment person then also knows. This helps us streamline as soon as something happens. We also have regular meetings, and this is the time of the year when we're meeting every few weeks because, even when I can see the data, it’s useful to ask them to help us interpret it as we get closer. It's also where we see gaps, like students who maybe signed up for orientation, but not for housing. These gaps determine where we do follow-ups. If many pieces are missing, okay, admissions will take that lead. But if the gap is primarily just housing, we will do the follow-up. We all share that burden to make it more manageable as we move forward to make sure we have the class size we need.
Matulja: I completely agree with paying attention to those demographics. A big one for us is the male-female ratio and paying attention to that as early as possible. We have had to flip an entire hall after not anticipating that ratio shifting as much as it did. And it continues to shift a little bit each and every year, with more females and fewer males.
Adding on to what Tim said, we have a first-year communications council that we work with rigorously starting December 1 when our contract is live. Because, again, we capture that intent to enroll for the institution, and we send weekly numbers to our admissions office; it's actually not just to admissions, but also to orientation, the registrar, all the different pieces that might be impacted by our incoming numbers, just to let them know where we are. We compare that with the last five years of data, and we become an integral part of that conversation in regards to next steps for a student.
Once we get to May 1 we become that next big step as well, because we were the housing contract piece, and now we're also the room selection piece. We do room selection prior to orientation so that students can take an action step and know where they're going to reside prior to attending orientation. We work in collaboration with orientation and admissions, and sometimes even with the registrar and the advisors, to best understand when a student does or doesn't take an action. We have lines of data that we coordinate, and we work with different constituents to make sure we're making the best predictions possible in regard to our melt throughout the summer and also moving forward in the best way possible for all students.
Rodgers: In line with that, we have our software system, and the university has theirs. We set up a couple of custom fields when we first integrated them, and one of those is the “declined admission” field. When a student tells admissions they declined, admissions will update their database, which feeds over to us. This creates a dynamic list so that it's easy to cancel those students. That is one way we can reduce our application count and begin to release those beds during room selection.
We have to do room selection way earlier than many campuses since we do not have enough space on campus. Our room selection opens up in mid-March and closes April 18. We have some administrative stuff that we do to clean up before May 1 to compile our standby list. That leads to some of those tough conversations that our housing ambassadors are having with students and parents on the phone right now. You know, they say, “My daughter or my son is so set on Auburn. That's the one place that they felt connected to of all the different universities they toured.” But we haven't been able to secure a space for them yet, and they're almost in tears on the phone.
We wish we could offer a space to every single student, but we have such finite resources here at Auburn. That’s one more reason why we have an open line of communication with admissions and have feeds from our databases, which allow us to release those spaces quickly. Making room for as many students as possible means that we then have a smaller standby group to work through for that melt during the summer. Later in the summer we will get a list from orientation and compare that to our list of students who have reservations on campus. Orientation is a requirement to enroll, so if they don’t attend it, we can immediately cancel them and assign some more students off standby.
Sidarous: The availability of housing will absolutely affect the size of the freshman class. If a student is trying to decide where to go to school, and if they can’t live there, then maybe they are going to go someplace else. The profession has this interesting mix where some campuses do not have enough space for their students, while others have plenty of space. Those conversations between housing and admissions are different in terms of how they optimize housing communities to bring in and retain students.
Albert: A big one for us is that we do a lot of cross-training with admissions. We have built out that partnership by helping with different presentations and events throughout the year. Like last year, because of the FAFSA thing that happened, our admissions staff started to get nervous and began hosting events every Friday and asked if one of our staff members could be part of them. Now I keep on offering because one of our big recruiting areas is Hawaii, so I'm always like, hey, whenever you're in Hawaii, I am perfectly willing to help.
But the admissions and housing staff are very intertwined thanks to that and things like our housing exemption committee that some of the admissions staff serve on. Actually, about 15% of their staff originally came from our staff, as they have hired many of my former resident assistants.
Matulja: I'll reiterate what Jneanne and Tim just said. I think the investment we make in enrollment management is a critical component of our continuing to pull forward the value of the live-on experience and clarify how important it is for our first-year students when we can offer it. It’s critical enough to us that housing invests in sending staff to Charlotte or Dallas and all across the country as we're trying to help bring what makes Ohio University special to potential students, hoping to bring them here as well. I think it's an important part, and I love what we do in the partnership. It also makes our jobs that much more interesting.
Clark: The nice thing about everybody here is our positive view of the relationship, but I don't know if all our colleagues across the country have that. I think the important piece is knowing that our goal is to recruit and retain the best students at each of our campuses, and part of our role is working with our colleagues in admissions. Sometimes, they may make a mistake, or their numbers come out wrong. If they go over, we try to figure out where to fit people. But we also depend on them to help us if we make mistakes. It has to be that kind of understanding, and I appreciate how all my colleagues on the call here are very open to that.
I've been in other spaces where people are critical of our colleagues in admissions. But they don't have the easiest job in the world, and I think our goal is to try to help them. We all benefit by knowing how students succeed when they come to campus if we can retain them. This is a partnership, and that's the whole key. It's not us in isolation or them in isolation. We have to really work together if we want to succeed for the institution.
Mallory Sidarous is the director of university housing at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. She previously served as chair of the ACUHO-I Mid-Level Leadership Institute. Cover photo and header photo courtesy of Ohio University. Student ambassador photos courtesy Auburn University.
