Changes to the UChicago housing and residential system including how housing is assigned.

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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Dear UChicago Parents and Families,

The below message was sent today to our students regarding three changes involving residential life and the College.

Please encourage your student to be touch with the College Academic Advising Office at collegeadvising@uchicago.edu should they have any questions.

With the growth of the College over the past decade, the University of Chicago has sought to deepen its commitment to the student residential experience. I write to share three changes involving residential life and the College.

First, residential life has long played a vital role in the undergraduate experience, fostering intellectual and personal development and a vibrant student community outside of the classroom. To fortify academic support in this community, the Office of the Dean of Students in the College this year assigned advisers to incoming students by House, instead of by adviser availability. Not only is this enabling a more personalized approach to academic advising, but it also is encouraging the alignment of academic and residential life.

Second, to promote equity in the assignment of housing, beginning in the 2019-2020 academic year, first-year residential assignments will be made by random ordered choice rather than by the enrollment deposit date. Assigning housing by lottery will ensure all students have the same chance to live in their preferred residence hall.

Finally, we believe that living, studying and socializing in our housing communities has a deeply positive impact on student intellectual engagement and well-being. To extend these benefits from housing and residential life, starting in the 2019-2020 academic year, all incoming College students will be required to live in on-campus housing for two years, instead of one year. The two-year residential requirement will give students deeper ties to this supportive environment and the resources it provides.

These changes are not retroactive. That is, students in the College today will remain with their current academic Adviser through graduation, and the two-year live-on requirement only will apply to new students entering in the Class of 2023 and beyond.

For questions about College Advising, please email the College Academic Advising Office at collegeadvising@uchicago.edu. More information about Housing & Residence Life and the assignment process will be available in 2019.

With warmest wishes,

John W. Boyer
Dean of the College

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We were glad to see that the requirement to live in on-campus housing for two years is not retroactive. No idea whether my son will choose to live in campus housing next year (doubt it at this point), but at least he won’t be forced to if he has a better option.

Also glad to see they are moving to housing lottery since housing was such a disaster this year…

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That’s great! Should my daughter actually get in, I would want her to live on campus all 4 years if I had my say…

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https://www.chicagomaroon.com/article/2018/11/21/new-megadorm-coming-university-make-student-live-d/

This is remarkably similar to the move UPenn just made: https://www.thedp.com/article/2018/09/upenn-2021-sophomore-housing-required-greek

Sure, living on campus can enhance community ties, but neither Chicago or Penn engaged in the appropriate investment to make really compelling housing choices - choices that would also see interest for FOUR years, let alone two. (Put another way, this seems smack of Chicago and Penn looking enviously at the residential systems found at Harvard or Yale, and trying to emulate them. The ecosystem around Chicago is very different, than, say, New Haven.)

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Glad to hear they’re getting rid of the order by deposit date. My S loves living on campus. He also loves the house system.

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In the lengthy thread on dorm assignments many on this board advocated for a lottery system. John Boyer must be a reader of CC. The cogency of the arguments made on this forum had their due effect!

The mandatng of a second year in dorm is surprising - to me at least. Generations have seen it as a rite of passage to make the move in second year into an apartment so as to begin to live at least a simulacrum of an adult life. But that was partly because it was the done thing. Some must have felt peer pressure to do it, and those that remained behind in second year (I was one) felt accordingly a loss of the communal esprit that characterized first year and a sense that they were regressing. If everyone must remain in dorm a second year that stigma is taken off. The phenomenon of second-year blues is also ameliorated when you are not in that year also on your own with just two or three friends, friends who may be less easy to live with than it seemed at the time. The communal life is jollier and less perilous. Third year is soon enough to become an adult.

Logistics may come in to it as well. It was hard enough 50 years ago to find an HP apartment (I never succeeded but was happy enough in Woodlawn). It can’t be any easier today, when the seekers are so much more numerous. Taking the second year’s off the market will ease the situation.

@Cue7 dependably sees only emulation of H and Y in this, with C doomed always to fail by those lights. Sigh.

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“Sure, living on campus can enhance community ties, but neither Chicago or Penn engaged in the appropriate investment to make really compelling housing choices - choices that would also see interest for FOUR years, let alone two. (Put another way, this seems smack of Chicago and Penn looking enviously at the residential systems found at Harvard or Yale, and trying to emulate them. The ecosystem around Chicago is very different, than, say, New Haven.)”

Yale students are moving off campus.

http://talk.qa.collegeconfidential.com/yale-university/2110646-residential-college-system-weakening.html#latest

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Not too surprising, but my son is also glad it isn’t retroactive as he was already planning on going off campus next year. I’m curious about the advising move (probably the least sexy of the three). People who live together are advised together. Not seeing that making a huge difference one way or the other, unless it is going to be done by people who actually live with the students.

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To add to the thoughts…My kid has friends at Yale and Harvard so has stayed some weekends and knows the living accommodations. From what he’s seen their dorms are not as nice as UChicago’s but (aside from the rules) also have not had attractive, affordable alternative housing availble until recently at New Haven. It’s hard to compete with the extra room and convenience of the Hyde Park apartments. My son’s building is closer to classes than his previous dorm and he has a nice bedroom to himself, shares two bathrooms with just 2 people and has the kitchen/living room plus more storage room. Costs are the same as dorms and there’s no seasonal move in and out. Plus the building is all students so there’s an informal “house” atmosphere. He’s made close friends in the building. What I like is that they had the experience of independently finding, leasing, furnishing, arranging for utilities and paying the bills monthly starting at the end of freshman year. I was initially very resistent to the idea feeling that on campus life would better expand his overall university experience. I now don’t think it affected his ability at all to have a wide friendship circle. Plus the practice in setting up living arrangement has also been useful as they went forward with summer internship housing needs. At least they know the right questions to ask.

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On the other hand, with Hyde Park becoming an increasingly attractive community thus with appreciably higher rents
in the not far distant future, may be the kids will end up feeling fortunate they will have access to University controlled on campus housing over the next few years. My son and roommates already have locked in their apartment rate for the next years with long term leases. New renters are already paying more.

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My kid said she and her friends are looking in Woodlawn as it “affords” better options than HP. :wink:

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Yale also does academic advising by residential college, or at least used to. The whole system is different, though, because unlike Chicago Yale uses faculty as advisers, and does not have a staff of dedicated advisers. When I was a freshman, my adviser was one of the university chaplains. He had seven or eight advisees in my class in my college. When I declared my major, my academic adviser became a tenured faculty member who was a fellow in my college and advised everyone in that college who had my major. (It was a relatively small major. Large majors had multiple faculty members per college as advisers.)

One issue Chicago is going to face with the new system: There was a wide range of ability, experience, and dedication among the advisory staff when my kids were there. Some people were thrilled with their advisers, and for good reason. One Chicago parent formerly on CC credited his daughter’s academic adviser with leading her step-by-step through the process of obtaining first a Goldwater and then a Rhodes Scholarship over the course of 3+ years. Neither of my kids ever had the same adviser for more than a year, and neither ever had an adviser who had more expertise than having read the Core Curriculum requirements. Good advisers vs. bad advisers will become a real point of difference among houses.