With this year’s housing lottery underway, significant changes to the process are impacting the student body. In December 2024, Davidson College’s contract with its former housing portal, The Housing Director (THD), expired—opening the door for a new system to be adopted by the Residence Life Office (RLO). This new platform is StarRez, a cloud-based residential community platform with over 1,300 organization users, including Yale University and Coastal Carolina University.
Assistant Director of Housing Operations Ashley Smith is excited about the College’s new contract. “[It] offers a lot of different portals, different resources for our students to use. So even though this is our first year, we do think it’s going to be a great tool for us to use.”
Despite dealing with a new system, similarities will be present, as THD merged with StarRez in 2022. “The company that we are with now, StarRez, they bought out The Housing Director system, so it’s all now in one big corporation,” Associate Director of Residence Life Charlene Kilpatrick explained.
A more pertinent change for Davidson students, however, is the application process for the lottery system. Notably, every student now has to fill out their own application, whereas in prior years students filled out one form as a group. This choice was made by RLO primarily so that students would not have to rely on others to fill out an important application. “What if a student forgot to put your name on the application? [Y]ou’re putting your housing in someone else’s hands,” Smith stressed.
Additionally, the timing of the lottery process has changed. “Instead of us doing it over so many variations of days and weeks, we’re slimming it down to between one to three days,” Kilpatrick said. This platform also allows for a clearer view of what spaces are actually available during the lottery process. “[The] StarRez system is very interactive for students to be able to see all the open spaces versus how it used to look in our previous system,” she continued.
A more controversial modification to the lottery system among upperclassmen students is the inclusion of Armfield within the general Martin Court apartment housing lottery. In prior years, the Armfield lottery ran separately, as it’s the only building that houses five students per apartment. Now that it has been added to the general lottery, one problem remains: being forced to kick one roommate out in case Armfield apartments are not available.
Maya Vermeer ‘26 underwent the process with her friends last week. “You have to put in all your roommates [to the application] and then put in the person that you will kick out [of] the five-person [group] so that you can live in a four-person suite or apartment instead,” she explained.
Social dynamics are already difficult when choosing roommates, but this added tension can force friends to come to an unsettling conclusion over who should be kicked out, even if the situation never arises. In the case of Vermeer and her roommates, this feature of the application served as a roadblock in their attempt to get an Armfield apartment. “Me and four of my friends were thinking about doing it, and we ended up deciding not to,” Vermeer elaborated. “No matter who we are gonna kick out or if we got it or not, it would always be ‘that one friend was gonna be kicked out of the group,’ and that just felt terrible.”
Stella Davis ‘26 felt similarly to Vermeer. “Overall, it’s been a lot more stressful than what I’ve heard it’s been in previous years. It’s just because they’ve changed the system, and now there’s a lot more strategy,” she stated. “We ended up coming to the conclusion that [choosing Armfield] was too risky, because if you didn’t get it, that fifth person that you were living with would […] have to get dropped, and honestly, with the new system, there’s nowhere for that person to go.”
RLO additionally emphasized that there are many aspects that point toward a more contentious housing lottery process. Namely, the pandemic contributed to larger class sizes among the class of 2026. “Our classes have been really large in the last two years […] it’s only a certain number of apartments on our campus. I wouldn’t say it’s more difficult just because we went to StarRez because any software would never change the occupancy that we have on campus,” Smith said.
This change in the upperclassmen lottery system can be seen as the product of an amalgamation of broader changes caused by using a new residential platform coupled with new leadership within the RLO office. Dr. LaFarin Meriwether took over as Assistant Dean of Students and Director of Residence Life in 2025, ushering in a readiness for change within the office. However, many of these adaptations to the process have been spearheaded by Smith. For instance, Smith took the lead on developing the Wildcat Matching aspect of the housing application: “[she] started a Wildcat matching process where students are able to say ‘Hey, I’m looking for a roommate, and tell me some things about you’,” Kilpatrick said.
With so much change occuring, RLO is eager for feedback from students. “We want this to be a very good process for you all […] so we are very much open to the feedback,” Kilpatrick concluded.
