Virginia Tech will house about 200 students in a Holiday Inn near its Blacksburg campus coming this fall.
A dramatic surge in enrollment for the 2019-2020 academic year left administrators scrambling for alternative housing, with the school expected to take in 1,000 more than the 6,600 freshman it had originally anticipated.
In one effort to deal with the spike, school officials reached a tentative agreement with the Holiday Inn Express hotel on Plantation Road, near Prices Fork Road.
The 195-bed hotel will operate just as a residence hall on campus does, and will be closed to the public for the duration of the school year. Its online booking system shows no rooms are available after Aug. 6, weeks ahead of the first day of classes on Aug. 26.
School officials are also pursuing other ways of accommodating incoming freshman amid the overflow, including agreements with other hotels, maximizing space on campus and offering to compensate students for delaying their attendance by up to a year.
