Once again, University Housing denied hundreds of incoming freshmen the opportunity to live in campus residence halls. Although Smith Hall and the new Ogg Hall opened in the last two years, nearly 700 students are not able to live in University housing. In order to prevent future shortages, the university must find a way to guarantee housing to incoming freshmen.

Further necessitating the matter, UW-Madison is the only school in the Big Ten to not guarantee housing to incoming freshmen. What seems to be a standard for other schools in the conference is apparently not a top priority at UW-Madison.

This is not the first time the university has denied housing: This has been an issue for years. While planning Smith and Ogg, the new dorms, the administration could have included more bedrooms to mitigate the issue, but they failed to leave enough room to accommodate everyone. While a few hundred students are denied housing annually, the administration seems more worried about having empty rooms than denying housing to hundreds.

While an unusually large freshman class can always yield a need for more rooms than are available, the university should at least make an attempt to cut down on the margin of students who are denied. Their method of lowering that margin is the proposed Lakeshore expansion, set to open partially in 2010 and fully in 2012. Those dorms will offer more than 500 additional beds, but that number doesn’t guarantee housing. While these dorms are still in the design phase, the university should try to accommodate everyone who wants housing.

This much-needed Lakeshore dorm expansion is yet uncertain. The execution of the plan depends on the final state budget. The Republican-led Assembly’s budget proposal does not provide the permission for the construction of the dorms, while the Democrat-led Senate version does.

The addition of those extra bedrooms is vital to minimize the number of students denied housing. Lawmakers must give UW-Madison permission to allocate funds for the new dorms.