This year, Marquette avoided a housing crunch like last year's, which resulted in 30 male students living in a downtown hotel. Another Milwaukee-area college, however, isn't so lucky.

Carroll College in Waukesha has 2,200 full-time undergraduate students this year — a record for the small liberal arts college, according to Claire Beglinger, a spokeswoman for the college. A student body of that size is too big for Carroll's seven dorms and two apartment buildings, Beglinger said, and so the college is housing 64 non-freshman students at the Ramada Inn, 2111 E. Moreland Blvd.

Freshmen students are not being housed in the Ramada Inn because Carroll's administration felt the two-mile distance from campus might isolate them.

"We believe it's important to keep freshmen in the (Carroll College) community," Beglinger said.

Students living in the Ramada Inn were able to choose to do so, according to Beglinger.

"The Ramada was offered as an option, just like our dormitories," she said.

Living at the Ramada costs $2,850 a year, which is no more expensive than any of Carroll's dormitories, Beglinger said.

The opening of Abbotsford Hall — formerly Abbotsford Apartments — to 112 freshman this year was partly responsible for not needing any off-campus housing this year, according to Mary Pat Pfeil, senior director of university communication.

A slight dip in the number of students needing to be housed on campus and the switching-around of the gender assignment of a floor in McCormick Hall also helped avoid a housing situation like last year's, according to Jim McMahon, dean of residence life.Ninety-three percent of this year's incoming freshman needed on-campus housing, which is about 40 students fewer than last year, McMahon said. Switching the 11th floor in McCormick from all-female to all-male also helped alleviate the problem, since the lack of student housing last year was all-male.

"We were in good shape for female space," McMahon said. "The crunch came for men."

Though the floor is a "swing floor" and could ostensibly revert to being all-female, McMahon said it will probably stay all-male in the near future.

"Our estimates are that if we continue to have the gender balance (in incoming freshman classes) that we continue to have, that floor will stay male."

This article was published in The Marquette Tribune on September 1, 2005.