By Neil Offen

noffen@heraldsun.com; 419-6646

DURHAM -- N.C. Central University students who have been housed in a hotel five miles from the school this semester are headed back to campus.

The university has notified the Millennium Hotel it will end its lease for 300 beds at the hotel at the end of fall term, Dec. 18.

"We don't need those beds at the hotel any more," said NCCU Chancellor Charlie Nelms at the university's Board of Trustees' meeting Wednesday. "We have room for all the students who are still at the hotel in on-campus housing now."

One hundred and one Central students are still housed at the hotel on Morreene Road, and except for the 13 who will be graduating at the end of the semester, all can move to NCCU residence halls for the spring term.

The number of students at the hotel -- 300 in September -- had decreased during the course of the semester, as more housing became available on campus, said Jennifer Wilder, director of residential life.

"We got cancellations," Wilder explained. "People who were in on-campus housing canceled for a variety of reasons -- they didn't register or didn't get their financial aid or found an apartment off-campus. And so more housing slots opened up, and that has continued. That's why we don't need the hotel beds anymore."

Because the university had its largest-ever first-year class -- 1,347 students, 312 more than last year and nearly 200 more than had been projected -- it was forced to find additional housing to accommodate the influx.

Over the summer, it signed a lease agreement with the Millenium, the lowest of four local hotel bidders, to help ease the housing crunch.

"One of the conditions of the lease was that at the end of the fall semester, we could end it," Nelms said. "That was the beauty of the lease, we had an option for the spring semester, but we were not tied to the lease for the whole academic year."

Students assigned to the hotel were junior and seniors, since the large influx of incoming students already had received their housing assignments and been guaranteed on-campus locations.

Of the 300 students originally scheduled to live at the hotel, 47 of them canceled at the beginning, preferring to find housing elsewhere. Other students then were assigned to the hotel until on-campus housing began to open up after a few weeks of the semester.

Some of the students at the hotel, however, didn't want to move back to campus.

"For some of them, there was a cost differential," Wilder explained. "If they were moving back to Eagle Landing [a residence hall], that cost more than the Millenium, and they would have had to pay the differential, so they decided to stay where they were."

The university paid the hotel, which also provided shuttle service for students to and from campus, more than $600,000 for the housing. Wilder said the arrangement had worked reasonably well.

"Some students complained at the beginning about being off-campus, and some didn't want to move back," she said. "But in general, it worked pretty well."

The university, Wilder added, would consider such an arrangement again, if it had to, "but we don't want to have to keep doing this. Financially, it has been a real burden for the university."