Which schools have the worst housing options, with the oldest dorms, lack of off campus housing options and overall worst environment regarding housing, for both incoming students and for upper classmen?
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Trinity and Conn College by far the worst. Also consider food if you are considering housing. The other schools are pretty close to each other. Bates maybe has the newest and most varied housing, including school-owned houses with different themes and a brand new complex opening this fall. You are safe in terms of food and housing at all but Trinity and Conn College. The rest all good and obvious food and housing are a priority for the admins. Standouts for food are Bowdoin and Bates, Middlebury right there as well.
In the Ivy, U Penn is the worst. Bad food and bad meal plan, bad dorms and off campus housing is even worse. Cornell has outstanding food.
Take my advice, though, good food is more important than good housing. The best meal plans are the ones with no limits because you will spend more money getting food elsewhere. U Penn is a good example of a very bad plan, each swipe is about $18.
Thanks @OnTheBubble I hear you on food. But for my purposes, housing is the key factor for D2 who wants to cook for herself and have a nice place and not deal with dingy dorms or old and dilapidated housing. Her older sister is going to Wesleyan and she was sold on the senior housing options, to have their own house with friends and all. We visited Conn last year, but not Trinity. Conn seemed very self contained, so I guess there are no off campus options?
Trinity is in a bad part of Hartford, similar to Penn in Philly. The NESCAC schools other than Trinity and Conn College don’t have dingy dorms and dilapidated housing and they have variation from traditional to suites.
http://www.bates.edu/tour/residential-buildings/ See all the options where “house” is in the name. Also look at Moody, Rzasa, and Hopkins for suite style housing.
Very few students live in non-school housing at LAC’s, 1–2% generally.
The best NESCAC residence houses/halls I’ve seen are at Hamilton and Williams. The comments on Bates (post 1) also appear persuasive. As a guideline, the absolute best residence halls will house 150 students or less, irrespective of the overall size of the college.
Hamilton does have nice housing. My son did an overnight there and he liked it.
How about the IVYs any of those on the ‘avoid’ list in terms of just housing options? Outside of the these schools are there any of the ‘safety’ types for high achieving students that one should be aware of poor housing options? Clark? Skidmore? BC? etc… ??
I really don’t care for Skidmore’s room designs. The closets/window seat/door in the doubles are near one side of the room or the other (with the beds in between), offering no seclusion whatsoever for either student.
Harvard, I believe, has a major residence hall complex about a mile from the center of campus (with architecture that has been described as “hideous”) in what I’d think would be an undesirable option.
Been to Clark. Very nice on campus housing. The area around campus is hard to judge. Good food.
BC housing not anywhere near its prestige level and many freshman live on the Newton campus. Food Ok. This is BC’s biggest flaw, housing. The area around BC is very affluent and I would bet very expensive.
The safety school in this case with the best housing and food is Scranton. Off campus area is very nice too. Scranton on campus housing is great. I believe they even clean inside the rooms twice a week. The project on Mulberry Street has brand new suites with individual bathrooms. Outstanding, with a fitness center on the main floor.
OP? So your daughter’s priority is housing senior year? The NESCAC schools generally have on campus requirements, several through senior year including Wesleyan.
@OnTheBubble actually she is thinking she would like to have her own house or apt with friends before senior year. She likes the senior year option, but like most kids does not want to wait until senior year to get it. So she wants to cross off her list schools where options to get a good sophomore/junior housing is not very good…
If that is case, she better carefully review policies. In NESCAC I know that Bates, Hamilton, Colby, Amherst and Wesleyan require students through senior year to live in campus housing, some others may be through sophmore and junior year. I would disagree that kids that go to LAC’s want off campus, non-school housing based on what I have seen first hand. It would be best for her to see first hand what the housing choices are like, not whether they are school-owned or not.
Penn’s dorms are actually really nice, especially when compared to some of the other ivies’. None of the dorms could be characterized as “dingy” except for maybe Hill which is in the process of being renovated. Otherwise, Penn has renovated (or is currently renovating) all of its College Houses within the last 10 years and continues to make improvements. There are a variety of options from the traditional Collegiate Gothic Quad College Houses to the High Rise apartment-style College Houses with beautiful panoramic views of the city. They are all very clean and very well maintained. One building did have a pretty substantial flood at the end of this year but maintenance was on the scene and taking care of it- I have no doubt the building will be good as new come the fall. Finally, Penn’s New College House promises to reinvent on campus living at Penn (http://hiddencityphila.org/2013/11/groundbreaking-tomorrow-for-penns-new-college-house-at-hill-field/). It looks like a very sleek, and beautiful addition to Penn’s college houses that promises a great living experience to residents.
Off campus housing is also really, really nice. Some of the buildings are definitely run-down and could be considered dingy. That being said, you could also just choose to live in one of the many many many buildings that are not run down at all. Housing around Penn is abundant and only a block or two away from campus. Cheaper options include beautiful converted Victorian homes at very fair prices or more costly apartments in buildings like the Radian or Domus. The options are genuinely endless and of very good quality.
Penn’s housing was one of the major reasons I chose Penn over Yale, and Columbia (my other two top choices). I loved that at Penn you had so much independence in being able to choose the living accommodations that work best for you. There is no stigma to moving off campus and there is no issue with changing College houses each year if you decide that your tastes have changed. All of the housing options offered a unique opportunity to experience Penn and Philly according to your wants and needs. At Columbia, after freshman year you are literally thrown into a very complicated and somewhat unfair lottery for the most prized dorms. The feel of the housing is significantly more urban as much of it is located away from the center of campus and can lack common spaces for socializing. While nearly everyone at Columbia lives on campus, their dorms can actually be farther away from their campus than Penn’s off campus housing is to Penn’s campus. In contrast, I found Yale’s residential colleges to be stifling. They are undoubtedly beautiful and foster community within them but they felt limiting. There seemed to be a lot of pressure to live on campus and to center much of your social life around the residential college as opposed to the other organizing forces that appealed to me most. I also seriously considered Brown (which had the worst housing options by a mile and a half) and Princeton which felt like hybrid of Yale/Harvard/Penn housing. It kind of tried to be the best of all worlds without actually succeeding in any, one particular area. I also lived in Princeton housing for a summer and found it to be overrun with cockroaches… At Penn I lived both on and off campus and truly loved it. At one point, I had a house with 4 of my best friends less than a block from campus with a lovely living room and a newly built roofdeck. I had one maintenance issue the entire time I lived there and it was fixed almost immediately. It can take a little work to find the right options for you but the best part about Penn is that their really are so many options genuinely available to students and you can’t go wrong with most of them.
And Penn is NOT in the bad part of Philly. Penn’s campus is incredibly safe and campus police patrol the surrounding area as well to ensure that students are safe. I have never felt safer in an urban environment than I did while a student at Penn. I don’t think that Joe Biden and Donald Trump would send their children and grandchildren to a campus that was anything less than 100% secure. Much of the bad reputation for Penn’s campus comes from stories about Philly in the 1980s-- stories that have no basis in the reality of living in University City in 2016.
Glad to answer any questions about Penn housing or choosing between Penn and other ivies if you have them. Good luck with the process going forward!
@OnTheBubble the OP is referring to the fact that Wesleyan offers seniors their own houses (small self-elected groups) or apartments senior year as part of their on campus owned housing plan. Their system is designed to put students into gradually more self-sufficient real-world housing environments with each progressive year and their joke is the senior year will be the nicest place they live in for the next decade (implying the real world housing they can afford will be less nice).
Interesting on Cornell’s food being outstanding (#2 above). My son and I took two meals in the student cafeteria and were underwhelmed, but maybe its just our tastes. Similar with housing at Williams, at least the freshman housing we saw.
Bowdoin, for the record, gives everyone multi-room dorms from freshman year. You still have roommates but even the most basic 2 person arrangement has a sleeping room and a common room. 4 person pairings have 2 sleeping rooms and a common room. The one gotcha is a small percent of freshmen end up in “quints” with 5 people – 2 in one sleeping room, 3 in another and a common room to share. Still, having that room you can study or socialize in independent of the bedrooms is a nice option.
@Skidmore, a good majority of the dorms for freshman and sophomores are pod-style: one double and two singles that share a bathroom. The doubles this year all became triples for the first semester but D asked for a room change second semester and got a single to herself. The doubles have a 10’ window seat with to-the-ceiling window, the singles have a smaller windowseat, maybe 4’, gorgeous! Upper classmen have the option of apartment-style living and one of the complexes is only a few years old. This was a big selling point for my D.
For the Fall 2016 semester they are offering off-campus apartments due to over-enrollment.
@citivas I understood completely about Wesleyan but Wesleyan requires all students to be on a meal plan…which I think is great, so its not real “off campus” housing.
Cornell is often ranked at the very top for food. I have eaten there several times and thought it was quite good.
I believe Skidmore’s dorms, at least the ones with which I’m familiar, typically have two doubles and two singles per bathroom (with one shower). I found it to be a generally awkward arrangement overall compared to other schools I’ve seen, even in cases in which the total space is the same.
Regarding Williams, though technically the residence halls may not be exceptionally nice, they appear to suit their purpose really well.
I could have sworn that that Trinity had very nice housing for upperclassmen. There are all those new condo style units down the hill, and the housing along the Long Walk is all suite-style, many with fireplaces, etc. With that said, I think that what’s offered to incoming freshmen is much bleaker…
FWIW, though, while I might consider housing in my decision, I don’t know how much I’d prioritize it. If you DD is looking for a school where many students live off campus as upperclassmen, Tufts could be one to consider.
I am more concerned with food quality, healthy choices and access than the fanciness of dorms, especially freshman year. Bad food causes a lot of problems, health, bad grades and spending lots of money on junk food. I am amazed that so many people don’t eat at the schools when they visit, even when its free. Schools that make their own food almost always have good food. St. Anselm has a food line right out of Catholic elementary school central casting but lord was the food good, while F&M had this fancy neon space serving the most average food service stuff. We are Italian so what is served is very important.