Facing a shortage of dormitory space as more returning students decide to spend another year living on campus, the University of Massachusetts Amherst will house more than 100 students at an off-campus hotel in Hadley this fall.
The students will live in the Econo Lodge on Route 9, about 20 minutes by bus from the flagship UMass campus. According to university spokesperson Ed Blaguszewski, the group consists of 120 incoming transfer students who will stay in double-occupancy rooms in the Hadley hotel.
It will be the first time since 2005 that UMass houses students off campus, he said.
Though the exact size of the incoming freshman class will not be clear until nearer to the start of the fall semester, on Sept. 6, the university expects to have strong first-year enrollment, Blaguszewski said. Coupled with returning students’ growing interest in staying in campus residence halls, UMass did not have enough dorm space to house its full undergraduate population.
The university believes that the uptick in students living for an extra year in dormitories, as opposed to moving to homes or apartments rented off campus, may be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic.
For the incoming junior and senior classes, the first years of college — when UMass students typically live in campus residence halls — were marred by COVID. The soon-to-be seniors had their freshman year cut short in March of 2020 when UMass and colleges across the country pivoted to remote instruction and sent students home. Most students were not allowed to live on campus the following fall. When undergraduates returned en masse to the dorms in the spring of 2021, their experiences were heavily influenced by COVID and related health restrictions.
Hence, many of the incoming juniors and seniors may have decided to stay an additional year in UMass dormitories, making up for lost time living fully immersed on their college campus.
“We find that students greatly enjoy the experience of living on campus, and two cohorts of new students largely missed a full campus, residential experience due to the pandemic over the past two years,” Blaguszewski said by email. “As a result, we believe that’s why more returning students chose to live on campus.”
In 2005, the last time UMass housed students off campus, about 60 lived in a Howard Johnson hotel on the same stretch of Route 9 in Hadley as the Econo Lodge, according to an article from the time in the Massachusetts Daily Collegian, the school’s student paper.
That fall, the freshman class had 4,400 students, up by nearly 200 from the previous year. More upperclassmen undergraduates also decided to live on campus that fall, the Daily Collegian reported on Oct. 6, 2005.
At the time, Blaguszewski told the paper the demand for campus housing showed that more students were interested in attending UMass.
“In some ways, that’s a good problem to have,” he said. “People want to come to UMass. On the other hand, we want to be as accurate with our projections as possible.”
The university expects its undergraduate population this fall will be similar to last year. The fall of 2021 saw 22,745 undergraduate students attend UMass; school projections place this fall’s number close to 22,700.
Though UMass has a hotel located in the center of campus, it did not have space available to accommodate the transfer students, Blaguszewski said.
Most of the transfer students living at the Econo Lodge can expect to stay there through the end of the fall semester, according to a university webpage set up to field their likely questions. For the spring semester, the school said the students will be given priority for a campus living arrangement.
Students living at the hotel will pay a discounted housing rate of $3,353 for the semester (a standard shared room on campus costs $3,920 per semester). Each room will include its own bathroom, two sets of desks and dressers, a TV, refrigerator, air conditioning and Wi-Fi. The hotel will supply linens and clean the rooms weekly. Laundry is available on-site.
For travel to and from campus, the students will have nearby access to the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority’s B43 bus route, which runs between Amherst and Northampton.
Students can also commute on their own to UMass, and will be prioritized for spaces in commuter parking lots on-campus. The school webpage also said two vehicles rentable through the car-sharing service Zip Car will be available for rental from the hotel parking lot.
The front desk at the hotel is staffed around the clock, according to UMass. Similar to in dorms, residential life staff will live in the hotel to assist with any emergencies students encounter.
Blaguszewski said the staff will be available to support students as they familiarize themselves with the school. He added that UMass will host “a variety of engagement opportunities” in the hotel for students to connect with each other.
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