Chandler Holt wasn’t expecting to live in a Best Western the first semester of her sophomore year at Tennessee State University. But two-and-a-half years into these “unprecedented times” of ours, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that things still aren’t back to normal.
Holt, who is from Birmingham, Ala., and comes from a family of TSU alums, is one of more than 1,000 TSU students living in a hotel this semester, with thousands more doing so across the country. Many colleges and universities nationwide are facing housing shortages, explains Craig Goebel, a principal with education consulting firm Art & Science Group in Maryland. Freshman classes are larger than usual, in part because some students deferred starting college during the pandemic. Being isolated from their peers made many students — freshmen and upperclassmen alike — crave the full collegiate experience, and thus embrace living on campus. Goebel says schools in metropolitan areas, particularly in areas like Nashville that are popular destinations for both school and careers, are more likely to see upticks.
TSU is also facing a unique set of challenges making its housing shortage more acute. Historically Black colleges and universities are seeing what’s being called an “HBCU Renaissance.” Applications and enrollment are up due to a number of factors, including attention thanks to high-profile football coaches like Eddie George at TSU and Deion Sanders at Jackson State. In May, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke at TSU’s commencement, further raising the school’s profile. TSU has the largest freshman enrollment of any HBCU in the country at 3,567 students.
“It’s a good problem to have,” says Frank Stevenson, associate vice president of student affairs and dean of students at TSU. “But it is a problem.”
TSU’s housing shortage is exacerbated by Nashville’s affordable housing shortage. “Other HBCUs, including Howard [University] in Washington, D.C., are seeing it too,” says Stevenson. “It is anywhere that housing prices are bananas.”
It’s not unusual for many upperclassmen to live off campus, but this year many who intended to do so experienced sticker shock when they saw how much apartment rents had increased over the past two years. So they requested on-campus housing. Of TSU’s 7,500 undergraduates, the school now houses 5,000, both on and off campus. (Stevenson says TSU’s graduate school programs see an opposite enrollment trend due to housing prices — graduate students who may be interested in attending TSU opt to go elsewhere because of Nashville’s high cost of living.) Goebel points out that nationally some schools (including TSU) offered refunds and credits to students who had to leave on-campus housing during the height of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Students who lived off campus still had to pay landlords, even if they were not in their apartments. So, he says, some students may see on-campus living as an insurance policy if a pandemic wreaks havoc on in-person learning again.
One of the tricky parts of anticipating how many students will want housing, Goebel says, is that historic models and formulas don’t necessarily line up in the post-pandemic world. At TSU, typically 31 percent of students who apply actually show up on the first day of class. This year that number is 41 percent. And that difference is part of what forced TSU to look at hotels and other options for student housing.
Other schools in Tennessee are facing housing shortages to different degrees. State-funded institutions like TSU and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville need to go to the State Building Commission for approval to rent hotels or other additional housing space. Private universities, like fellow Nashville HBCU Fisk University, have to find funding, but don’t need to go to the state for approval.
Stevenson reports that TSU has now found housing, both on and off campus, for all the students who requested it before the July deadline. Some students (fewer than 100) who submitted their forms late remain on a wait list. This summer, when TSU staff realized the school would need more housing, they requested funding for 12 hotels from the State Building Commission. In August, funding for five was approved, and several members of the commission, including Republican state leaders Lt. Gov. Randy McNally and Speaker of the House Cameron Sexton, asked what administrators planned to do to prevent this need in the future.
“Lt. Governor McNally’s main concern with Tennessee State University’s housing issue is that it seems to be a result of systemic poor planning,” McNally’s communications director Adam C. Kleinheider tells the Scene via email. “This is the second year in a row that TSU has brought a housing issue to the Building Commission. Last year’s approval of hotel space triggered concern but was ultimately approved as a one-time stopgap measure. When last year’s hotel leases were approved, TSU officials indicated to members of the Building Commission that they would not be asking for additional hotel leases in the future, because a new dormitory that came on line in August 2022 would be sufficient to handle any subsequent need.”
TSU student Chandler Holt in her room at Best Western
Sexton says commission members have received emails from parents expressing concern about their kids’ housing and what they say is limited communication from the TSU administration. While the volume of correspondence is not substantial, it is unusual for state legislators to get those kinds of emails at all, Sexton says. Stevenson concedes there was a lot of anxiety at the beginning of the semester, and that the school could have done a better job defining exactly what certain status, such as being on a wait list, meant. He says his team is working to set better expectations in the future, and adds that now that housing has been found for the majority of students — and for everyone who applied before the deadline — the calls from parents have decreased.
It’s worth noting that TSU has been historically underfunded by the state. According to a 2021 report by a joint legislative committee, Tennessee owed the school as much as $544 million in unpaid land-grant funding. Earlier this year, Gov. Bill Lee committed to paying TSU $250 million for infrastructure spending.
Stevenson says new dorms are in the works, and the state has promised TSU that construction will move quickly — but quickly in this context is likely three more years, so the problem will not abate immediately. He confirms that the next freshman class will have to be smaller, as the school simply can’t house another 3,500-student freshman class in addition to a 3,500-student sophomore class from this year. (The school does have the classroom space to support the larger student body, however.) Other adjustments may include capping the size of future classes and changing selectivity requirements for admission. Deadlines for housing requests will be moved earlier in the year so the school has more time to plan.
TSU needs to give its current students the best college experience it can, and help them learn, graduate and find careers — because having the largest freshman class ever is meaningless if students don’t succeed. The school has a significant number of students who are the first in their families to attend college, and making sure they have the support they need is paramount.
For Stevenson and his team, that has meant making a hotel experience a college experience. The school leased five full hotels, meaning non-students can’t stay there while they are being used as dorms. The lobbies feature banners and school decorations, and each hotel has residence advisers and TSU staff on site. There are 24/7 security guards (from both TSU and MNPD) in the buildings and in the parking lot. Shuttle buses run students from campus to the hotels and back, with a real-time app so students can track their rides. Shuttle schedules were extended after the school got feedback from students that they wanted to be able to be on campus later to socialize, dine or study. Library schedules were adjusted as well. Events, from game nights to career counseling events, take place in the hotels as well as on campus. Students who live off campus have the option of substantial discounts (free for in-state residents and subsidized for out-of-state students) if they choose to take online classes remotely.
Hotel living is an expensive proposition — according to the Scene’s sister publication the Nashville Post, the cost is about $7.2 million for the rooms and additional programming and services. By its spring semester, TSU plans to reduce its number of hotels to two.
To really effect lasting change, however, the city and state need to address the elephant in the room: Nashville’s dearth of affordable housing and reliable public transit. Some cities, Stevenson says, map public transit routes specifically to aid college students’ schedules and also offer discount transit prices. Such changes would also benefit students at Vanderbilt, Belmont, Fisk, Meharry, American Baptist College, Trevecca, Lipscomb and Nashville’s other institutions of higher learning.
While the hotel life wasn’t what students like Holt expected, the scenario has worked out. In fact, if she is assigned to be in a hotel again next year, she’d consider it. She likes going to a school where lots of people want to be — it makes for a good energy — and she enjoys having a single room to herself. She has a car, so her commute is about seven minutes from Trinity Lane to campus. Plus, she notes, the hotel has a fitness center, breakfast laid out every morning, and every college kid’s dream: in-room housekeeping.
