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Missouri to offer dorm room rentals for traveling football fans
Missouri has found a novel idea to use empty space in its dorm buildings and make a little money.
In the face of declining enrollment and slashed funding from the state, the school is going to rent out dorm rooms for traveling football fans in 2017. A four-bed room will be available for $120 a night.
From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
Free high-speed wireless access is included, along with economy bed linens and towels.
Renting rooms for football games in particular has been discussed for months. After a few years of declining freshman enrollment, with a large projected dip this coming fall, Mizzou leaders have taken seven residence halls offline and decided to explore avenues such as rentals to make up money lost on that space.
Residence hall rooms will be available for rent on weekends starting this fall. Reservations must be made 48 hours in advance of the stay.
Outside of traveling SEC fans, many Missouri fans travel from across the state to attend football games in Columbia. The city of approximately 100,000 people is located about two hours from both Kansas City and St. Louis.
If you’re willing to share a room with three other people, $30 a person per night isn’t a bad deal. Especially if you want to pretend you’re in college again. One of the dorms that has rooms for rent is where the esteemed author of this blog post lived during his sophomore year. That’s a huge selling point, right?
Missouri enrollment is projected to decline approximately seven percent in 2017. The total expected enrollment of about 31,000 will be the lowest enrollment at the school in nine years per the Columbia Daily Tribune.
Many have pointed to the 2015 protests on the school’s campus that involved the football team as a reason for the enrollment decline. But the reasons for the drop are a bit more nuanced than that. The size of high school classes in the state has declined.
The enrollment drop is also exacerbated because of the budget cuts. The UM system has had widespread layoffs following the state government’s decision to cut millions from the higher education budget.
For more Missouri news, visit PowerMizzou.com.
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of Dr. Saturday and From the Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
