Greensboro Reporter

A housing crunch is nothing new to many colleges and universities, but it has gotten to the point at North Carolina A&T that students held a protest this week, calling for the school to reduce admissions since so many students can’t live on campus.

"I'm a current student that's here that needs housing and I don't have housing,” Haleigh Aldridge, who organized the demonstration, told WXLV. “I don't know what I'm going to do for the next semester.” 

It’s not unusual for large universities to only guarantee dorm space to freshmen and maybe sophomores, with the expectation that upperclassmen will want to live off campus. But Aldridge said that rent increases have priced many students out of the off-campus housing market.

"For off-campus housing, it's too expensive for a lot of people and everything,” she said in the WXLV report. “You have to think about the furniture that you're going to need, the food that you're going to need at your apartment and that's just not reliable for everybody. A lot of people that I've talked to have to drop out or withdraw from the school and transfer and that's not acceptable.”

She wants the school system to re-examine the situation.

"It makes me feel upset like you come here for an education and you expect the housing and the education that you need to be met,” Aldridge said. “When you're not getting half of that it's like where is this going? Why am I here if I'm not getting the things that I need and you would think that the number one HBCU would have that for you.”

As for cutting back on admissions, Aldridge said that needs to be considered.

"They should definitely think about that, because over the past years like you said they're saying this is our largest class,” she said. “My class right now is our largest class but the classes coming in after me is the largest class now. We just need to slow it down a little bit for people that are coming in so we can still have housing for current students."

Aldridge also questioned how the on-campus housing lottery was handled this year, saying technological issues inconvenienced a lot of students.

“We had a whole internet hack during our housing and housing was supposed to be open for a whole month,” she said. “It was open for a good week and a half and a lot of people their time to pick housing was supposed to be at the end of the month but they weren't even able to do housing. So that's an inconvenience for those people.”

The problem even drew support from some who live off-campus. Jayla Richardson is not on campus now, but she noted that she regrets it.

“I won't be in the middle of a lot of things," she told WXLV. “I won't have the accessibility just to go like oh here's an event let me go do this like it's something I would have to plan out a lot more and I might not have the means to make it. It definitely is a thought in the back of my head like how far away I'll be from everything.”

The university didn’t respond to the matter in the news report.