With the completion of two new Uptown residence halls this past summer, Tulane University announced that students would henceforth be required to live on campus through their junior year. The updated campus housing policy is backgrounded by a surrounding local community that has long campaigned against Tulane students moving into the neighborhood and turning “doubles to dorms.” Among students, however, the prevailing understanding of the rationale for the policy change was as a money grab by the university, which also began to require first and second-year students to purchase the most expensive, unlimited-tier meal plan. 

An analysis of The Hullabaloo’s student survey confirms this sentiment as the dominant one. The survey, collected in Fall 2025, comprised a total of 216 eligible respondents who were approximately evenly distributed among class years. 59.6% of the sample disapproved of the policy to some degree, compared to 20.9% of the sample who approved of the policy. The remaining 19.6% of respondents indicated that they felt neutrally or did not care either way about the matter.  

Among those who disapproved of the three-year housing requirement, the largest portion indicated that they were “very dissatisfied.” Those students who were most dissatisfied were more likely to be sophomores than any other class year, making up 36.7% of the group, followed by juniors (26.5%) and seniors (22.4%). First-years tended to feel more positively about the housing policy change than other years, though only a small number indicated that they were “very satisfied.” Of the total students who approved of the policy to some degree, the greatest portion (10.7%) replied that they were only “somewhat satisfied” with it. 

While students generally disapprove of the three-year housing rule, the survey results also suggest students generally feel positively about the quality of their on-campus residences. 52.9% of respondents indicated that they were satisfied with housing quality; 24.7% indicated that they were dissatisfied; and the remaining 22.4% indicated that they felt neutrally about the matter. Interestingly, attitudes about campus housing quality did not scale evenly across class years: Roughly three out of four sophomores felt satisfied with their housing, compared to only slightly more than one in two first-years or juniors.