Twenty-two new graduate student apartments opened this year at 71-73 Charlesfield Street, the largest step in recent years in the University's effort to create a centralized community for grad students on College Hill. While officials say there is no housing crunch for grad and medical students, including that population in campus life still remains a priority.
Currently, only 10 percent of graduate students are housed in University-owned buildings, and 98 percent of grad students live off-campus, with only 55 beds of dormitory-style on-campus housing in Miller Hall on Pembroke campus. The University provides one-bedroom and efficiency units and some two-bedroom units for about 120 graduate students.
Chad Galts, communications director for the Graduate School, said the high number of grad students living off campus is "totally average" compared to other schools.
But Rich Maher GS, a second-year grad student and secretary of the Graduate Student Council, said he'd like to see Brown make more of an effort to provide centralized housing for the fragmented grad student population. "We come from all over the country and all over the world ... and it can be hard since we don't all know Providence," he said.
It can be particularly difficult for incoming first-year grad students to get settled, he said, and the University should make more housing options available. "I think if the University developed something exclusively for graduate students, there would be interest particularly among first-year students," Maher said.
As a result of the Campaign for Academic Enrichment, the University has been improving upon the existing graduate housing program by increasing its offerings and creating more appealing living environments for graduate students. This year, the University opened a formerly vacant property at 71-73 Charlesfield St., after spending about $2 million on renovations to develop the 22 apartments.
To provide for visiting scholars' accommodations - which are currently scattered around College Hill - the Office of Auxiliary Housing recently proposed a similar project to the University to develop 28 new apartments in a formerly vacant property, slated to cost about $4 million.
In 2004, the University began offering guaranteed housing for first-year graduate students coming to Brown from more than 1,000 miles away. Because students must start looking for housing far in advance of their arrival on campus, finding housing is difficult or impossible for most foreign students, said Gail Medbury, director of the Office of Auxiliary Housing. But with 35 percent of the graduate population coming from abroad, many first-year grads can take advantage of the guaranteed housing.
About 70 students typically apply for the guarantee. After these spots are taken, there are usually enough left over so that the University can take applications from other students as well, fulfilling their requests on a first-come, first-serve basis. Medbury and Galts said the guarantee has been easy to accommodate, putting no additional pressure on the University to meet students' housing needs.
New dorms constructed by Johnson & Wales University and Providence College have also made additional off-campus rental housing available, creating an abundance of housing in the rental market in recent years.
In the fall of 2005, 500 Rhode Island School of Design students who had been living primarily off campus moved into a new dormitory, creating housing vacancies on the East Side. For Brown grad students, this meant more ample housing opportunities on College Hill. The new dorms, combined with many potential rental tenants' decision to buy instead of lease property in Providence, have caused the local rental market to go soft, Medbury said.
"Overall, this is a self-rental market," Medbury said of graduate and visiting scholar housing. "A lot of the people that would spend $1,200 a month on a monthly rental decided to buy something."
Though Galts and Medbury said grad housing is not an administrative concern given what they see as ample supply, Galts said the University could always do more.
"Do we wish we could do more? Yeah," Galts said. "(The) problem has solved itself in a certain way. Is it the best way? I don't know."
For the last several years, developing additional grad housing has been repeatedly proposed as a possible project for the Plan for Academic Enrichment as the University seeks to strengthen a campus sense of community for the currently scattered grad student population. The University has explored potential expansion into the Jewelry District and has already begun acquiring properties in the area for administrative and research purposes. A working group was assembled to explore the options for graduate student housing, and in May 2006 an online survey polled fellows, grad and medical students and post-doctoral fellows about housing in the Jewelry District. Of the 2,750 contacted, 56 percent responded and 55 percent of those respondents expressed a desire to live in the Jewelry District. The working group concluded that between 400 and 950 students and fellows could potentially be interested in living in the area.
In a February report, the working group noted that while there is no housing shortage putting pressure on the University to build additional grad housing, "the University's interest in building such housing is a reflection of the desire to provide greater community-building opportunities for this constituency as well as to remain competitive among its peers who do make housing options available and convenient to graduate students."
