<p>Yale's residential college system is usually considered a defining characteristic of Yale life. But how is that different from other colleges who also have residential colleges, such as Harvard? </p>
<p>Wouldn't every residential college system develop student pride/community in each respective college?</p>
<p>The residential college system is definitely one of the best parts of yale. You get assigned to your college the summer before your freshman year. Everyone lives with their college all four years, though most freshman (all but TD and silliman) live on old campus, but in buildings and rooms with only freshman from their college. This gives you a community from the time that you come. Each college has a dining hall, library, gym, and other facilities so you will hang out there a good deal, even during your freshman year. Each college also has a master, who does social things for the college, and a dean who is in charge of academic things. You will get to know your dean and master from the very beginning of your freshman year and they will be with you the whole time you are here. </p>
<p>as a yale student, i really don’t know that much about harvard’s house system so i won’t go into it too deep, but the main difference is that at harvard, freshman are not assigned to a house. All (or most) freshman live together on harvard yard, but not with the same people they will be in a house with. During spring semester at some point you split into the group you want to live with, and your suite (and possibly another group you blocked with) gets assigned to one of the houses where you will live for the next three years. </p>
<p>i personally like yale’s system better-more of a community feeling from the start and less drama for picking suites</p>
<p>As Goolsci pointed out, you are assigned to a Residential College before you arrive and so the colleges representative of the class as a whole. At Harvard, people “block” together and are then assigned to a house. </p>
<p>Yale also has a pretty structured IM system. If you played sports in high school (or even if you didn’t) you can continue to play in multiple sports for your college. Search IM on the Yale site and you’ll see there are three seasons of sports - including Co-ed innertube water polo.</p>
<p>It’s also important to recognize a crucial difference between both Harvard and Yale, on the one hand, and practically everywhere else with a Johnny-come-lately residential college program, on the other.</p>
<p>The colleges/houses at Y and H were built to provide a three-year experience (four in some cases at Yale). The rooms are not cookie-cutter; most of the colleges/houses have “aspirational” housing for seniors that is really special. That contributes mightily to keeping people on campus and in the same “dorm”, and produces the kind of multi-class, multi-year community that people rave about at Yale and Harvard. Also, all of the colleges and houses have their own dining halls – supremely inefficient from a cost standpoint, and utterly critical from a community-building standpoint.</p>
<p>Lots of college presidents and trustees admire the Yale/Harvard system, and many have tried to imitate it, but very few existing dormitories were built to provide the kind of experience that the colleges/houses provide, and it’s ridiculously expensive to do it from scratch. (Yale budgeted $500 million apiece for two new ones; Princeton spent $350 million, I think, on Whitman College.)</p>
<p>It also helps if the surrounding area does not have a lot of high-quality, cheap student housing to pull people off campus. (At Harvard, it’s not cheap; at Yale, it’s not high quality. Penn and Chicago try to have something like a residential college system, but everyone moves off campus because it’s better AND cheaper.)</p>
<p>Go to <a href=“http://www.yale.edu/admit/pdf/viewbook.pdf[/url]”>http://www.yale.edu/admit/pdf/viewbook.pdf</a> and see pages 9-10. No other universities even come close to comparing to this system, even if they have been trying hard to copy Yale’s system since the 1980s as a marketing ploy.</p>