Columbia Mail delivered 8,868 student packages to residence halls in August 2023 – a 59% increase from last year's previous historic high of 5,562. The Mail team made deliveries to every undergraduate residence hall, including the Brownstones and East Campus.
In July, students were notified by Columbia Housing that they could begin sending packages to campus in early August for Columbia Mail’s pre-delivery program. Any package received before the mid-August cutoff date would be in the students’ rooms when they arrived for Check-In.
This year, Columbia Mail received and delivered 7,930 packages before the cutoff date — plus an additional one thousand packages received after the cutoff date that were still delivered in advance. About 5,000 of the total packages (56%) belonged to First Years, with a total of 626 unique recipients. The remaining packages delivered – about 3,800 – were to upperclass students.
About 400 packages were delivered to the Brownstones and East Campus, with 25% of these packages being considered heavy or bulk items. While this volume represents a small portion of the total deliveries, complexities like limited elevators must be noted. Bulk or oversized items require multiple Mail staff members for one delivery, and while East Campus has elevators, the majority of rooms and all of the townhouses have multiple levels that are only accessible by staircases.
In Columbia Housing’s annual Check-In survey, the pre-delivery program received positive feedback from many students. Some of the open-ended responses included: