Three days before his deadline to decide where to attend
graduate school, economics student Ben Hood said he visited UCLA
and was guaranteed housing ““ a perk that made his decision
slightly easier.
“If I didn’t want to come here, I’m not sure
that guaranteed housing would have made the difference,” Hood
said. “(But) it definitely made the decision a little bit
easier.”
Hood now lives in the Weyburn Terrace apartments, a brand-new
complex for graduate students run by the UCLA Housing
Administration.
Used as an incentive to recruit some of the nation’s most
competitive students, Weyburn Terrace has been home to widespread
problems since it first opened at the end of July 2004.
Some of the problems include flooding in multiple apartments,
insect infestations, faulty appliances, broken elevators and
half-finished paint jobs.
Before the buildings were even completed this summer, university
administrators used the complex to recruit top students.
Students, especially those coming from other states, often ask
recruiters about housing arrangements because Los Angeles is so
large, said Andrea Sossin-Bergman, assistant dean of admissions at
the UCLA School of Law.
Sossin-Bergman said that students will not come to UCLA’s
law school solely based on housing, but that having it helps make
UCLA more competitive.
“They would like to live as close to campus as
possible,” Sossin-Bergman said.
“We’ve never had that opportunity
(before).”
But some students who said guaranteed housing greatly influenced
their decision to come to UCLA said the university broke its
promise.
“We move in here thinking that this is going to be
no-hassle living, so that we can focus on our graduate
studies,” Hood said. “And (we) turn around and this
becomes this whole stressful part of our lives. … I can’t
wait to get out.”
Another student, Shawna Rasul from Cleveland, Ohio, said Weyburn
Terrace helped sway her decision to attend UCLA’s law school
instead of the USC law school.
“When I made the choice between UCLA and USC, obviously
the housing and being close to school was a very big draw,”
Rasul said. “The law schools are fairly the same.
That’s when you start making decisions on things like housing
and the availability of housing.”
But, like Hood, Rasul felt betrayed by the school’s
promise of good housing.
The pictures and the blueprints that were sent to her about
Weyburn Terrace looked amazing, but “it was almost tantamount
to false advertising,” Rasul said.
Katrina Emmons said there has been no compensation for problems
in her apartment and that Weyburn Terrace helped her decide between
law school in New York and UCLA.
Housing is very difficult and expensive to find in a big city
like New York, and the attractiveness of convenient, affordable
housing at Weyburn Terrace helped pull Emmons to the West Coast,
she said.
Director of Housing Michael Foraker said Weyburn Terrace was
first envisioned over five years ago as part of Chancellor Albert
Carnesale’s program to compete with high-caliber schools.
During the initial planning process, Housing took a general
survey of graduate students already at UCLA, and Foraker said that
affordability, convenience and privacy were the three most
important housing issues for students.
“Those three considerations absolutely drove the
interactions with our architect. Those three things were paramount
in our mind,” Foraker said.
“What we think we’ve been able to achieve is one of
the best housing projects for graduate students in the
U.S.”
Victoria Ortiz, assistant dean of student services at Boalt Hall
School of Law at UC Berkeley, said housing and the cost of living
is very important to all graduate students.
Tuition for law school is higher than that paid by
undergraduates, and graduate students sometimes face tough
budgetary constraints, Ortiz said.
She added that she is sure there have been admitted students who
went to another school because they could not afford housing and
the cost of living at Berkeley.
The total cost of school and living is important to students
like 23-year-old Jordan Berman, who graduated from Brandeis
University in May 2003.
Berman was recently accepted to law school at UCLA and said cost
is one of many factors he will consider before he decides where to
go to school.
Before he makes his decision, Berman is still waiting to hear
back from law schools at Harvard, Stanford, New York University and
Columbia ““ some of the schools UCLA directly competes with
when recruiting graduates.
The hope is that guaranteed housing can help put UCLA over the
top for some recruits like Berman, who are deciding between
high-ranking schools.
Each graduate department is allocated a certain number of beds
that it can guarantee to students. This year, the UCLA School of
Law was guaranteed 59 beds, the David Geffen School of Medicine 130
beds and the UCLA College 291 beds, among others.
When completed, Weyburn Terrace will be able to house over 1,385
students.
“We have been somewhat disappointed in the past three
years because we have not had specific housing that we could
allocate to graduate students,” Foraker said.
Foraker and other housing administrators assured that the delays
and construction problems affecting students at Weyburn Terrace
this year will diminish and that the complex can continue to be
used for recruitment.
Many students also said they have absorbed the temporary
problems at Weyburn Terrace and imagine that issues such as
temporary housing, unfinished or half-painted apartments and
missing appliances will not be problems in the coming years.
“When we make an offer to a graduate student, we are
competing with some of the best graduate schools,” said Tony
Chan, dean of the Division of Physical Sciences.
“(Weyburn Terrace) is the competitive edge that we have
when competing with (those) schools.”
Bruin staff Lee Bialik, Charlotte Hsu and Daniel Miller
contributed to this story.