My first initiative as an undergraduate senator was to run a campus-wide survey about last spring’s housing selection process, which left many students feeling confused and upset. Housing selection will never satisfy everyone, but — with an average satisfaction score of 2.2 out of 7 — it’s clear the 2024 process failed to clear most people’s bar.
The biggest concern of students was the palpable increase in Office of Accessible Education (OAE) assignments, which many believe are being exploited to grab the best housing. So I met with many administrators in the Stanford Housing Machine (my umbrella term for R&DE, ResEd, CoRL and the URGC), and I learned this student concern was something very real: OAE accommodations have risen by 200% in the last few years. But housing sees this as a problem beyond their control. “We can’t refuse any accommodations,” they explained in our advocacy meeting, arguing that the only thing to do is raise our concerns to OAE itself.
Housing’s view was understandable: they can not unilaterally restrict the number of accommodations. But the rest of the University also has plenty of reasons to ignore the ballooning OAE problem. Raising documentation standards could make the accommodation process harder for under-resourced students. A crackdown might also spark an all-school witch hunt for ‘fake OAEs,’ targeting students with less visible disabilities the hardest. And of course, every rejected OAE application risks non-compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Even still, inaction will only cause the OAE balloon to grow as students sense that ‘there’s no way to get good housing without OAE.’ While the Housing Machine can’t control the volume of OAE applications, they can still ease the pressure. The OAE balloon reflects a deeper issue: students feel a lack of agency after years of stressful housing cycles. Many undergrads now try to avoid another dreadful process by getting an OAE assignment instead. So I offer these five reforms that can help the Housing Machine relieve pressure from the OAE process while maintaining all existing accommodations.
1. Make reassignment easier without OAE
Administrators I met with in October did not see why students would register with OAE ‘just’ to escape a bad roommate situation. They said that, through R&DE, “there are 148 spaces available for reassignment right now; nobody should feel forced to live in a room where they feel uncomfortable.” Yet, for many students, R&DE’s mid-year reassignment process feels like an impossible ordeal, tangled in contradictory guidance from Housing Service Centers, Resident Directors and dead-end service tickets. R&DE’s website does not even have a guidance page for undergraduate reassignment! In contrast, OAE registration is extremely human: students know the exact Disability Advisor who processes their application and with whom they can get face-to-face answers from. R&DE could reduce new OAE applications simply by making the reassignment process less bureaucratic and faceless when compared to OAE registration.
2. Bring back data-informed housing selection
Before the failed project of ResX’s neighborhood system, we had a system called ‘The Draw.’ While not without its faults, The Draw gave students data and information to plan for housing season. You knew exactly how many students were ahead of you and which draw numbers secured spots in each dorm in previous years. Best of all, you could choose which year to use your best draw number and which year to take your worst. Today’s housing selection offers almost no tools for planning. Even with a primary plan, a backup, and a backup for the backup, housing groups can still end up scrambling if the portal dries up faster than they thought. Students need clear, public data about housing selection to regain a sense of control.
3. End sophomore-priority
Since 2024, housing selection has allowed rising sophomores to choose their house and room before juniors and seniors — but only from doubles and triples in non-themed RF dorms. The Neighborhoods Task Force report framed this compromise as a way to ensure sophomores have RF-dorm support while “[ensuring] seniors and juniors have access to the most desirable room types.” Unfortunately, Stanford lacks enough singles and two-room doubles to truly realize this. Of roughly 2,800 private sleeping spaces, 350 are in Greek houses, 400 are in application-based themed houses, 500 are RA rooms and an increasing number go to OAE students. The result is many juniors and seniors picking housing after sophomores, but not actually gaining access to “better” rooms. Their housing quality stagnates year-over-year — unless they pursue an OAE accommodation.
4. Expand the number of themed houses
Pre-assignment lets students bypass housing selection by applying into one of 17 themed communities. However, since 2000, Stanford’s range of themes has thinned. Beyond ethnic and co-op houses, we have just six academic themes: humanities, arts, liberal education, public service, the outdoors and exploring energy. But residential life doesn’t need to be so limited: Lantana was once design-themed, Kimball focused on performing arts. Before the ResX Task Force, over 40 dorms leveraged pre-assignment in some way. If the Committee on Residential Learning (CoRL) recommends the housing of more themes at next year’s review period, Stanford could offer more communities that students would prefer to live in. Applying to a house — or even ranking multiple houses, as we did during the pandemic — can give students a sense of control in a system otherwise driven by luck.
5. Renovate, renovate, renovate
Between RF-dorms, apartments and row houses, each with singles and doubles all the way up to ten-person communes, Stanford has a wider spectrum of housing options than most colleges in America. Certainly, let-downs are to be expected with housing stock as diverse as ours. But it’s unreasonable that the spread of living conditions is as wide as the distance between Ng and Mirrielees. If Stanford narrows the gaps in our housing stock by converting one-room doubles into two-room doubles across campus, students won’t need to pursue accommodations to have a chance at a private sleeping space.
From when I started advocating in the Undergraduate Senate, it’s hard to believe that reform is possible: Stanford is a hulking, 18,000-admin bureaucracy, whose diffusive structure of responsibility armors itself against even modest change. Departments often blame each other for shared problems, and constant admin turnover sends progress spinning through the revolving door. But unlike other institutions, Stanford has no “off-campus” exit ramp when a student hates their housing assignment. We are all — undergrads, ASSU, R&DE, OAE, ResEd, CoRL — bound to each other and the 7,400 housing spots on campus. So let’s start talking to each other, release public, comprehensive housing data and make change happen together, before the OAE-balloon bursts in all our faces.
Mandla Msipa ’26