The Syracuse University Office of Housing, Meal Plan and ID Card Services is hosting open forums to help students navigate the housing lottery. While these forums welcome student participation, the fact of matter is that the forum came too late and only serves to educate students about the housing lottery, not provide solutions.

One of the forums was held on Monday and a second forum will take place Tuesday. Changes to the housing lottery were announced last October and detailed that students who had already fulfilled their two-year on campus housing requirement would have a limited selection of housing. Additionally, students who yet to fulfill their two-year housing requirement would be unable to live in single dorms.

The open forum, that took place on Monday evening in Shafer Art Building, provided additional details: Washington Arms will now exclusively host upperclassmen; and in addition to the housing that has been set aside for incoming freshman, rising sophomores will have on campus housing reserved for them.

But the forum comes just a month before the housing lottery that is set to begin on March 18. Rather than providing solutions for students who were dissatisfied with the housing situation last fall — when there was still a chance to explore alternatives — this forum was more helpful for freshmen who were new to the housing lottery. These forums come too late for upperclassman, and don’t serve the students who have the most pressing concerns about their housing situations next year.

Students who feel they have been wronged by the changes to the housing lottery should make themselves heard and attend the open forum that will take place on Tuesday at 7 p.m. in Grant Auditorium.

The university should have hosted a forum last semester on the heels of the announcement concerning the housing lottery changes. That could have helped upperclassman who don’t want to move back to main campus explore the options of moving off campus.

It’s good that the university hosted these open forums to ease the concerns of freshmen worried about the housing lottery, but it did not offer solutions to the upperclassmen that feel they got the short end of the stick.