Residence spots should be allotted to first-year students based on needs, not grades

When determining who gets a spot in residence during your first year of undergrad, your high school grades should not be the deciding factor of your eligibility. 

Despite being overjoyed at being accepted to McMaster University in 2021, as someone who does not live within commuting distance from the school, I was also heavily concerned about living in residence during my first year. 

While attending one of the onboarding information sessions McMaster offers to its incoming students about living in residence, I learned that I needed to have at least a 90 percent average to secure a spot in residence if I wanted to live on campus. 

Although I was fortunate enough to have an average that guaranteed me a spot in residence, I quickly realized that other students were not as fortunate. 

McMaster is regarded as a highly competitive university. With limited program choices and spots for high school students to fill, it's no surprise that the incoming student averages are significantly high, though acceptance averages vary across faculties and can lead to certain majors being disproportionately represented within residence.

For example, a potential Health and Society student would need a high school average between the low to high 80s while a Life Sciences student would need a high school average of the high 80s to low 90s to be considered for acceptance. 

The discrepancy in high school admission averages alone seems to favour certain types of programs. It is important to note that your program does not place you at a disadvantage for a spot within residency as only your high school average is considered. Yet, it can mislead you if you don’t meet the guaranteed residence cut-off while you meet your program cut-off. 

Once students are conditionally accepted into their program, they may want to maintain their current average rather than continuously work to obtain a higher average. 

Although there is nothing wrong with this, it may have put you at a disadvantage for residency as your program cut off differs from the residency cut off. This is only one circumstance why an incoming student may not make the residency cut-off.

Many more can be due to extenuating circumstances that a student had no control over such as family and personal challenges, the pandemic, and much more that cannot be explained by a simple average.  

Guaranteeing residency based on a student's grade limits student potential. 

Rewarding students a spot to live on campus rather than assessing them on a needs basis places students who require a place on residency but who don't meet the cut-off at a large disadvantage. 

On average there are around 8,044 first-year students incoming each year. However, there are only 4,186 rooms for these students to fill. This means that about 48 per cent of the first-year population will need to find a place off campus to live or commute. There are simply not enough residence spots to accommodate everyone. 

Students should be assessed on their urgency for residency rather than it being handed out for doing well in high school as their averages do not tell a complete story of who a student may be. Additionally, many students meet the guaranteed admission but do not need a residence spot and live on campus anyway for the experience. 

It may be more time-consuming for the university to read through all of the applications and assess who may deserve a spot in residence. However, this also weeds out the students who are not interested in residency as this process encourages students to reflect if residency is right for them. 

The transition between high school and university is difficult as it is. Students who truly need to live in residence should not be placed at a disadvantage because their high school average was below the guaranteed average of 90 percent.

McMaster University should transition from guaranteeing students with a minimum of a 90 per cent average a spot on residence to allotting first-year students residency spots based on needs. This change will benefit incoming students more than the current system and it will truly help those students who need a spot in residence.