What most people expect when they move into their first college dorm: one (maybe two) roommates, a basic bedroom setup, and a decent amount of privacy.

What Leah Lage got: five roommates, one huge, open room and a window into a public hallway.

Arrangements like Lage’s are more common than you probably think. Although the Association of College and University Housing Officers (ACUHO) says nobody knows exactly how many schools and students are affected by overcrowding, they say the problem is fairly common.

It forces housing directors to shuffle excess students into a creative variety of alternative living situations – and students are left to cope with odd furniture arrangements, loss of what little privacy they may expect and more people with whom to argue about decor. But being young, they may not mind any of it.

Lage, now 21 and working as a sales assistant in Newark, Del., experienced not one, but two, of the most popular solutions. Her freshman year at Connecticut’s Quinnipiac University was spent in a former study area that had been temporarily converted into a six-person super room.

The next year, she transferred to Emerson College in Boston, where her “dorm” was a nearby Doubletree Hotel. Lage says that she enjoyed both experiences.

In fact, as a freshman, she and her five roommates bonded so well that they ended up requesting to stay together for the whole year, rather than being allowed to move out as other spaces became available.

As for her sophomore year, as Lage puts it, “How could you not love living in a hotel? We had fresh-baked cookies every day, maid service twice a week, HBO and air conditioning.”

According to the U.S. Census Bureau and the National Science Foundation, the numbers of 18- to 24-year-olds fell steadily prior to the late 1990s, eventually dropping 23 percent from a 1980 high of 22 million.

But around the turn of the millennium, that trend reversed.

Today, census experts expect that there will be more than 21 million college-age people by the year 2010. This means that after nearly two decades of enrollment stagnation or decline, schools have been faced with accommodating a resurgence in student numbers to 1980 levels – in half the time.

In areas with the biggest population increases, primarily southern and western states like Florida, Texas and California, the growth is even more difficult to manage.

That problem can be further complicated when schools see unexpected spikes in enrollment, often caused by something as simple as winning a national sports championship.

So what to do?

Norb Dunkel, vice president of the ACUHO and director of housing and residence education at the University of Florida, offers this advice for students dead-set against “creative” dorm arrangements:

“In some cases you apply to the school and housing separately,” he says. “The people who are going to a college where housing is tight should have applied for housing a year early – before they start senior year of high school.”