Overcrowded colleges are giving students $5,000 to live off campus as Delta surges

• Elite colleges are offering ski passes and $5,000 to entice students to live off campus, Bloomberg reported.
• Colleges are crowded with students who deferred admission last year and newly accepted freshmen.
• The upcoming fall semester remains uncertain as the Delta variant surges in the US.

Elite colleges are throwing money and incentives at a very large problem: overcrowded dorms.

Packed with students returning from studying remotely and incoming students who took a gap year during the pandemic, universities are running out of housing for the Fall 2021 semester, Bloomberg's Maria Heeter reported. It's a particular problem, she wrote, for smaller, elite schools that pride themselves on their community and intimate experience.

From Middlebury to Dartmouth, top-shelf colleges are pulling out all the stops in search of a solution, offering incentives like ski passes or $5,000 to live off campus while rethinking dorms' structures and potential additions, according to Heeter.

New undergraduate enrollment plunged by 16% last fall, and by 3.5% this past spring. Many incoming freshman for the 2020-2021 school year chose to defer their admission, taking a year off in hopes of beginning college on a more normal note the following year. Some didn't have much of a choice - international students faced ever-changing travel restrictions, with some not allowed to enter the US.

"The reality is that there's going to be fewer enrollments and fewer graduates, and it's going to take time to get that back on track," Luke Skurman, CEO and founder of Niche, told Insider's Juliana Kaplan last spring. He said students who deferred acceptance, students who took time off, and future admitted students could create a "much larger than usual" enrollment in fall 2021.

An uncertain Fall 2021 semester

Skurman's prediction was spot on.

Harvard is expecting its largest freshman class in 80 years and Pomona College in California is anticipating its biggest freshman class ever, Heeter reported. Even larger colleges are welcoming record-setting class sizes: Purdue University, Indiana University Bloomington, and University of South Florida have all admitted their largest freshman classes ever for this fall.

The surge in applications has made it harder for some students to land a spot at elite colleges, which have seen acceptance rates hit a "record low," Insider's BreAnna Grant reported.

The overall enrollment uptick college-wide indicates that incoming freshmen were preparing for a more normal semester as colleges planned to reopen their campuses come fall. But the start of school comes at a time when the highly contagious Delta variant is running rampant across the US, which is creating another wave of uncertainty in regards to student life.

"The Delta variant is the wild card all of higher ed is watching now," Laurie Leshin, president of Worcester Polytechnic Institute and leader of the Massachusetts Higher Education Working Group, told the Boston Globe. "University COVID response teams across the state are actively tracking and planning for a variety of scenarios."

Colleges have been employing a variety of safety strategies, the Boston Globe reported, from mandating vaccines and wearing masks indoors to staggering move-ins and limiting outside visitors in dorms. It seems then that incentivizing students to live off-campus may not just solve a logistical problem, but also help create a safer environment.