UCI On-Campus Housing Problems

The shortage of affordable housing for UCI graduate students has long been known.
In the past, this has led to student protests, like the "tent city" in the central UCI park in 2002 (see here and here for accounts of the protests.)
For most graduate students, off-campus housing is not an option due to the exorbitant rent.

Recently, in an effort to grow the graduate admission numbers, the UCI Graduate Council has decided to offer every incoming PhD and MD graduate student on-campus housing.
While on the surface that looks like a generous offer, it in reality is very deceptive, due to the graduate housing shortage.
This offer would only work if students get thrown out of graduate on-campus housing after 3 years. The consequence would be that students who are in the middle of their dissertation research would instead have to scramble to find off-campus housing and, given the extremely high rents off-campus, may be forced to drop out of the graduate program due to unaffordability of off-campus housing.
The only real solution would of course be for UCI to build more graduate student housing, but that's not on the horizon for at least 2010.

Because of this practice of offering a deceptive deal to prospective incoming graduate students, UCI's reputation is already sinking. Students thinking of applying for graduate studies at UCI are well advised to take into consideration if they want to be affiliated with a university whose administration resorts to deceptive practices to "make the numbers."