Abhishek Shetty: Housing should eliminate stay-over fee and extend move-out deadline

Late Friday night, UCLA Housing employees will go door to door on the Hill to make sure that anyone who hasn’t paid the stay-over fee has left. The next day, at the break of dawn, they’ll come back and kick out anyone still in their room.

This sounds less like a helpful move-out extension from UCLA Housing and more like a syndicated crime shakedown. At this point, they only need to label the overstay fee as protection money and their role play would be complete.

Currently, if a student has a Friday final or they can’t leave campus until after Friday, they have to apply for a stay-over to stay on the Hill on Friday night. And if a student doesn’t have a Friday final, then they have to pay a $75 fee. To top it off, that overstay only lasts until 8 a.m. on Saturday, after which the student has to leave.

On the other hand, UC Berkeley’s residence halls close on the Saturday at the end of finals week, allowing students until 10 a.m. to leave with no form of extortion.

In the future, Housing needs to eliminate the overstay fee and extend the deadline so students can leave Saturday afternoon. The fee is an unnecessary charge for a stayover of a small amount of time for the few students who have a legitimate reason to do so and brings little benefit to Housing.

And the stay-over fee doesn’t take into account that students, especially international students, might have to book a flight months in advance – before they even know what their finals schedules look like. These students have no choice but to book a flight for after finals week. They have just as good a reason not to be charged as students with a Friday final do. While the fee is charged because the housing contract doesn’t include Friday night of finals week, even then, $75 is way too much. The stay-over fee for the entire winter break comes at an average cost of $39 per day, and that includes two meals a day.

The housing stay-over form also mentions in fine print that if circumstances will make you late, you should pack ahead of time and no exceptions will be made. This means Housing knows too well that it is completely possible you won’t have enough time to pack before the 8 a.m. deadline. Yet they choose to enforce it.

In defense of Housing’s policies, UCLA spokesperson Rebecca Kendall said in an email that Housing sets the checkout time as 8 a.m. so they can maximize operational savings and keep contract costs lower.

The problem with this reason is, considering that some students are already paying $75 for the stay over, there is no need to maximize operational savings when that is already compensated. If students staying over would turn their heaters on full blast, use every washing machine and dryer on the Hill and throw multiple extravagant parties, it would make sense for Housing to try and save money. But since that is probably not happening, the operational savings are minimal. According to Housing, most students are already out by Friday night, so there isn’t even that much money to be saved.

Another reason for this deadline is so that Housing can promptly begin preventative maintenance projects that are scheduled over the winter break. It’s doubtful that Housing starts maintenance work on a Saturday morning that would also be significantly impeded by the presence of a few students. There is plenty of time for Housing to conduct these projects over the winter break, especially considering that an extra week has been added to it this academic year.

Conversely, Housing allows students to come back two days before the start of winter quarter classes. If Housing can accommodate them then, they should be able to do the same for the end of fall quarter and spring quarter. If they are really concerned about making operational savings, then they should have students submit a form to stay over with the reason, but not charge any fee with it, while extending the move-out deadline to some time Saturday afternoon.

The entire concept of charging a fee ignores the fact that most students aren’t inclined to stay over in housing; once finals are done, it’s like a race to get out of here as fast as you can. The few students who stay do so because they have a good enough reason to, such as a late flight.

For this reason, there’s no point in Housing trying to skim as much money as possible from students. After all, this is the university that paid $300,000 for a speech from someone who thought campaigning with LeBron James would help her win Ohio. There’s undoubtedly more cash where that came from.