The University’s housing system is a strange and convoluted beast. Our system is unlike that of Yale, where the residential college system is for four years, or Brown, where there are no residential colleges and many students live off campus. The system is needlessly complicated and, for the students who risk a poor draw time each year, it could be much fairer.
The University places all first-years and sophomores in residential colleges. As upperclassmen, students can leave the residential college system, but they don’t have too. But if they want to stay, they have to move to a four-year residential college, and their options narrow to only three of the six. Alternatively, students can go into upperclassman housing, or independent housing, which is frequently in the same building as upperclassman housing and sometimes the rooms are even next to each other. Finally, students can look for housing in Spelman, which operates on its own system.
Residential colleges, upperclassmen housing, Spelman, and independent housing all have their own draws. Add in gender-neutral, substance-free, and married student housing, plus officers in eating clubs and off-campus accommodation, and the system is so complex that one wonders how anyone ever gets a room.
The system is complex so that students have choice. Having the option to stay on a meal plan as an upperclassman is good, as is the option to have a kitchen as an independent. But the system need not be complicated to preserve choice, as choice could still exist under one comprehensive room draw. With one university-wide draw, students could pick the appropriate housing option when their turn came. Naturally, some students, like underclassmen, would not be able to select certain rooms, but an intelligent system would know which students could draw into which rooms and easily deal with that issue.
Having one room draw would solve the problem of having to guess which draw is the best to pursue. Many upperclassman enter two or three draws, and, once the draw times are released, they have to decide if they will select a room in the draw in which they have the earliest draw time, or to wait for another, later draw and take the risk of missing the room they want. Multiple draws makes an already complicated decision even harder.
The current system also creates a lot of inequality in the quality of rooms. Seniority decides who goes first, and this is fairly non-controversial, but there are so many other factors that raise questions of fairness. As a sophomore in Mathey, I probably ended up with a worse room than I would have had if I had been in Rocky. Rocky is a two-year residential college, so sophomores get first crack at the best rooms. Mathey is a four-year college, so every junior and senior had the chance to pick before me.
Letting seniors pick before juniors, and onwards and downwards, is designed to prevent a student from getting an awful room for all four years. But a student can still lose in a relative way. There is nothing to prevent a student from being near last in their draws for all four years. A single draw would make it much easier to track a student’s luck each year, and it would allow for some system of weighting to ensure that a terrible time one year makes a better time more likely the next year.
Such a system of weighting should not be implemented in a way to discourage friends from forming a draw group. That could happen if some members of the group worry that, due to their friends’ favorable draw times one year, they will bring down the luck of the group in the next year. Regardless, some method of ensuring that a student doesn’t receive below average housing for all four years would be fair, and should be examined.
The University offers a lot of housing choice, and that’s a good thing. But the current system is difficult to navigate, results in unfairness, and could be greatly simplified and improved. There are better potential systems. Let’s switch to one.
Beni Snow is a mechanical and aerospace engineering major from Newton Center, Mass. He can be reached at bsnow@princeton.edu.
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