Becca Vitale poses outside the Pennsylvania Apartments courtyard on Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2025 in North Oakland. The University of Pittsburgh is leasing apartments and hotel rooms near the campus to house new students after admitting too many to house on campus. (Alex Jurkuta/Pittsburgh’s Public Source)
Even as higher ed braces for an “enrollment cliff,” the Oakland campus population has surged well past the dorm room count, adding pressure to the neighborhood.
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A record number of University of Pittsburgh first-year students recently began the first semester of college, many moving into hotel rooms or apartment units instead of traditional dorms.
“It feels like a dorm that’s a little bit elevated,” said Hannah Peck, a first-year student who moved into the Hampton Inn two weeks ago. “But still, you definitely feel disconnected from everything else that’s going on.”
Peck’s room at the Hampton Inn includes a private bathroom, a microwave, a fridge and a TV, alongside typical dorm beds. But, she said, it takes her about 15 minutes to walk to The Eatery, the campus’ largest dining facility.
University spokesperson Jared Stonesifer said all housing locations are within a mile of the heart of campus.
“It isn’t terrible when you think about big campuses that are spread out, like Penn State,” Peck said. “So [the issue] is not that. It’s the fact that you don’t feel on campus anymore – it’s the feeling, not really even the distance.”
Stonesifer said this year’s enrollment is “unprecedented,” surpassing historical trends and projections.
Pitt’s use of hotels and apartments as dorms comes amid planned gains in main campus enrollment that would buck industry projections, and slow progress toward proposed dorm development.
National enrollment cliff hasn’t yet materialized
Nationwide, experts have been predicting a drop in college enrollment rates for several years. A December report by the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education [WICHE] projects that the number of high school graduates nationwide will peak this year and fall 13% by 2041, because of low birth rates since the 2008 recession. Additionally, young people have been losing faith in the value of a college degree.
For now, however, Pitt’s first-year applications have only been growing. This is projected to mark the seventh consecutive year that the university has received a record number of applications.
First-year enrollment numbers peaked in the 2021-2022 academic year, in which Pitt officials said the pandemic and a test-optional policy boosted applications. Four years on, enrollment remains above pre-pandemic levels.
While enrollment data for this year’s incoming class is not yet available, Chancellor Joan Gabel announced in June that Pitt received nearly 65,000 applications — a 6.7% increase from last year.
According to a report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, as of spring 2025, the projected decline hasn’t yet shown up in the data. In Pennsylvania and across the country, college enrollment levels fell after the pandemic, then stabilized, and are now steadily increasing. National undergraduate enrollment in spring 2025 was still 2.4% below pre-pandemic levels.
“It’s reassuring to see some of the growth that is happening in the past year with universities reaching pre-pandemic enrollment levels after such steep declines,” said Hee Sun Kim, senior research associate at the Clearinghouse. “But we’ll have to see what we see of the upcoming fall and spring terms.”
Pitt plans Oakland growth
At Pitt, around 700 beds were added to accommodate this year’s incoming class. The university leased space for over 400 of them in three locations: the Hampton Inn on Hamlet Street, and on North Dithridge Street, the Pennsylvania Apartments and Webster Apartments. It also leveraged existing facilities, including the Franklin Apartments on Atwood Street, to add about 300 more beds.
According to Stonesifer, the university was unable to predict this year’s first-year class size. In part, he attributed the growth to Forbes naming the university a “New Ivy,” and Princeton Review listing it among the top 209 Best Value Colleges of 2025.
The university doesn’t plan to downsize anytime soon. Stonesifer said Pitt is on track to increase main campus enrollment to 22,000 undergraduates by 2028 — up from 20,418 last year — meeting a goal set in the university’s Plan for Pitt 2028.
Pitt isn’t the only Pittsburgh campus seeing growth. To accommodate an anticipated 25% increase in first-year students this fall, Point Park University contracted 40 to 45 rooms in the Wyndham Grand hotel, Downtown. Moving forward with its Pioneer Vision 2030 strategic plan, Point Park aims to increase its overall enrollment by 30% by 2030.
Dorms delayed, apartment costs rising
Pitt’s most recent Institutional Master Plan, approved in 2021, calls for new student housing construction to manage enrollment growth. However, dorm development hasn’t kept pace with demand.
The university has leased hotels and other extra housing spaces several times since 2020.
Andrea Boykowycz, an Oakland native and executive director of the Oakland Planning & Development Corporation, said the increasing student population is raising housing costs for others.
“Unlike other neighborhoods that experience gentrification, in Oakland, it’s not an influx of high earners,” she said. “It’s an influx of students who are able to live together to combine their rent potential to an extent that it exceeds the ability of any family to be able to afford to compete.”
To help mitigate this, Boykowycz said there needs to be more non-student residential development in Oakland. She said she’s happy that Oakland is included in Pittsburgh’s inclusionary zoning overlay, which means that at least 10% of the new units that get built there in larger developments will be affordable to households making less than 50% of area median income.
An untraditional first-year experience
Many first-years live in one of seven dorms in and around the Schenley Quadrangle, near the Cathedral of Learning. Peck said throughout welcome week, living far from there was a barrier to meeting new people.
Peck also said Blue Light Alarms, which are stationed around campus as a safety measure, can’t be found near the hotel.
Doubles at the Hampton Inn run $5,135 per semester, with the Pennsylvania Apartments and Webster Apartments going for $5,160. That’s comparable in price to buildings like Nordenberg Hall and Irvis Hall, but around $700 more per semester than doubles in Litchfield Towers, among Peck’s top dorm choices.
After not being assigned to a dorm, Becca Vitale called Pitt and waited on hold for an hour before finally learning she’d been placed in the Pennsylvania Apartments. She didn’t get information on the layout until about a month before moving in.
“The only thing I wish was done differently by the university is letting us know that this could be a possibility,” she said. She said other students were also caught off guard. “It was a big surprise, and now they just are super far from campus and have to pay more.”
Olivia Golden said she and others in the Pennsylvania Apartments, which houses 135 first-years, have been coming together to make the best of their atypical situation. She said hanging out in the courtyard and walking in groups has helped the building feel like a tight-knit community.
“We know we can’t do anything about it, so we just have to see the good in it, and do what we will,” she said. “Everyone’s kind of making it a freshman experience, and I would say it’s still a really good one.”
Femi Horrall is an editorial intern at Pittsburgh’s Public Source. She can be reached at femi@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Jamie Wiggan.
This article first appeared on Pittsburgh’s Public Source and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.