A new online survey published Tuesday and created by Northwestern Associated Student Government’s external relations committee is the first step toward creating a system for off-campus student residents to evaluate and compare their apartments and houses.
The one-page evaluation form is styled after the University’s existing Course and Teacher Evaluation Council system, External Relations Vice President Ethan Merel said. He said the committee wants it to be as user-friendly as possible.
“It is not going to be directly modeled off the CTEC system,” the Weinberg sophomore said. “The analogy is meant to get people excited about the prospects of the places they might be living before they actually sign the lease.”
Students are asked to appraise the condition of their current housing on a scale of one to 10. Specific survey fields include address, number of bedrooms and bathrooms, monthly rent, landlord name and rating, price of utilities and access to laundry facilities, parking and air conditioning.
The survey is available at groups.northwestern.edu/oche/.
Merel said the committee’s intent is to start building a database now that can be “usable by day one” of next Winter Quarter, when most students will be preparing to sign leases for the following year. He said they are hoping to gather as many participants as possible in the coming weeks, with a goal of several hundred responses before the end of this school year.
Merel said he is tentatively planning to close the survey at the end of Spring Quarter.
“The intent is to capture the evaluation of students living off campus this school year,” he said.
Despite the fact that nearly 40 percent of undergraduates currently live off campus, Merel said, the University has never developed a specific, independent system for students to evaluate their housing.
The last time ASG attempted to build a comprehensive evaluation system was prior to his arrival at NU, he said. Once launched, the initiative failed because of mismanagement, a lack of upkeep and overall low student involvement.
For that reason, the new system has been built from scratch, he said.
“It will not at all be modeled off of previous systems,” Merel said. “We’re just basing it off the same premise of off-campus housing evaluations.”
This is something students have adamantly requested ASG to begin work on again, Merel said. However, if it is to succeed this time, student participation is a must.
“We have heard the demand in ASG from students that this is something that students really want to have available to them,” he said. “That being said, ASG needs students to participate in this survey, otherwise it won’t provide the same level of usefulness that the students are seeking.”
There has also been some talk linking to the ASG project from the University’s pre-existing off-campus website, which can be found under the division of Student Affairs. The resultant merge would essentially create a one-stop shopping center for undergraduates trying to make the transition from living on campus to off campus.
Merel said he realizes it will take time for the data collected to represent most off-campus residents.
“Generally I recognize the first batch won’t be as comprehensive as all of us would like,” he said. “Hopefully once the information is online people will realize how useful it is.”
