I think the Yale example is very different than the tiered price housing options that began this discussion for one very important reason. Residential colleges are assigned randomly. NOT based on what a family can pay.
My daughter’s school has historically put all their first-years in one of two basic dorm areas—the “Quad” and “Sue B”. They’re really indistinguishable and not particularly impressive by today’s standards, TBH. But they become a source of identity and even loyalty for students, and there’s a healthy rivalry between the two contingents. When a beautiful, new dorm was built a couple years ago, it was decidedly less popular among the students. it was nicer. It was newer. But it lacked the tradition that made my own daughter’s allegiance to the “the quad” an important part of her first year. Again, students were placed randomly for the most part into those dorms and they all cost the same.
Back in 1972 when I went to UIUC, I pledged a sorority…the fact that my house had a turret (!), formal dining room and “parlors”, and a cool basement TV room with deep-pile shag carpeting was no small part of its appeal for an immature 17yo from central Illinois. It was like a Barbie dream house and a definite contrast to the rental farmhouse my family lived in when I was in high school. But, honestly, what I learned from living in a beautiful place was that people are more important than places, and I moved out early to share a rundown rental house with friends that I had met when I first got to campus.
It’s the separation and isolation of students based on SES (or race or nationality or other pre-existing feature that divides rather than unites the student body) that I find problematic. Not the accouterments or opulence of the housing itself.