@JHS, you wrote above:
“Granted, most of those are competitors of the University of Chicago, which is a large part of why Chicago wants to change long-term, but Chicago (and Penn, and Cornell, and Brown, too, I think) is more the norm.”
Just a inconsequential FYI: most brown kids live on campus through junior year (juniors at brown need to apply for permission to live off campus, probably because brown has enough housing for them and doesn’t want rooms sitting empty with income lost). And I think that at least half of brown seniors, or more, continue to live on campus. As a senior, no permission to live off campus application is necessary. The student simply doesn’t apply for on- campus housing in the lottery.
I knew lots of kids lived off campus at Brown as seniors, but I wasn’t certain when they moved off (which is why I qualified Brown by “I think”).
Chicago faces a little bit of a dilemma. It really depends on Hyde Park landlords and business owners continuing to invest in their businesses, in order to keep Hyde Park the special neighborhood that it is. If people stopped investing in Hyde Park, the University of Chicago would be a lot less attractive. Withdrawing undergraduates from the community does not help that, although the university would still furnish large numbers of graduate and professional students, faculty, administrators, and various others. But I think there’s little question that high school students and their parents look at Chicago and mark it down for not providing four years of dormitory space to all students.
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford (and others) have been successful at maintaining four-year on-campus residential communities, but their conditions are somewhat different. Nearby off-campus housing in Cambridge, Princeton, or Palo Alto would be prohibitively expensive for most students. And Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have spent vastly more on their dormitories than Chicago has or could dream of doing. The difference is in constructing a spectrum of room quality so that juniors and seniors can move up to much better living spaces, and also in providing unbelievable amenities such as in-dorm dining halls, theaters, athletic facilities, art studios, etc. (Stanford hasn’t really done that. But housing in Palo Alto is so tight that Stanford keeps having to build dorms for graduate students, too. Faculty will be next.) I’m not going to look up the figures now, but I think Yale is spending more than half a billion dollars to build its two new residential colleges housing about 1,000 students. Chicago’s budget for the 800-student South Campus dorm, on a per-bed basis, was less than a third of that, maybe less than a quarter.
Penn has followed a somewhat different model of working with private developers to have them build upscale student housing in virtual dorms very close to campus (sometimes closer to the central areas of campus than the Penn-owned dorms), which in some cases is managed by the Penn housing office.
I loved uchicago and Hyde park when I visited with my eldest son (it and brown were his two top choices). I hope that the neighborhood vibe doesn’t change at all. It’s a special place and there’s no beating a uchicago education.
Thank you all for your help! I haven’t completely decided yet, but I leaning more and more with Burton-Judson simply because I believe I had a misconception about how quirkiness develops in dorms. Burton-Judson is fantastic-looking, has better odds of me getting a single (according to conversations with people at housing, and a single is really essential for me), is near what I’ve heard is the better dining hall, has 2 courtyards, has more people, and is really close to the law school (and I’m pre-law), and also because it’s on the midway, which makes home feel a little different than the main campus, and also the midway houses an ice rink ( 
). I’m looking into a few more details, and will decide shortly.
There are UChicago dorms that have all of these
Re dorms with big communal kitchens available. I see photos with rows of gleaming stoves/ovens. Are pots and pans provided as well or do you have to bring your own? (Trivial question, I know, but I’m tasked with teaching DC and friends some basic dorm cookery, so there’s a practical reason I’m asking!)
@exacademic Pots and pans are provided by house funds
My daughter’s dorm – which is closing after this year – had one of those huge institutional kitchens. Kids were asked to pay a fairly nominal fee – $5 per quarter, I think – for the right to use the kitchen, and that paid for the equipment and maintenance. My son’s dorm had a small, rudimentary kitchen, and no one was asked to pay to use it. There were a few communal pots, bowls, and cookie sheets.
I don’t know if this thread is still alive, but if any current students or parents thereof have advice on this question, I’d appreciate it: If a student doesn’t commit until the first week or two in April, will Snitchcock be filled by then? And what would be a good 2nd/3rd choice for a student who wants Snitchcock – sounds like BJ, but what if you really don’t want a single.
Yes. There are a few doubles in BJ–put that high in your preferences.
Snitchcock most likely will not be available in early April. How about the new North Campus dorm? It will be open this fall. It will have singles and doubles. It will have its own cafeteria, and it is close to the main and science quads?
I heard about one person who got Snitchcock after RD acceptances went out, but that was the exception that proved the rule. The rule is that everyone in Snitchcock was accepted EA and committed by around now. Maybe that’s less true now, because the newer dorms are more popular, on average, than the dorms they replaced. But because it has the strongest four-year tradition, and because it is a relatively small dorm to begin with, Snitchcock never has a huge number of slots for first-years – probably 50 or fewer.
As I understand it, the fundamental appeal of Snitchcock is its uniform embrace of traditional Chicago nerdiness and hyperintellectualism – sort of like an anti-frat. There are lots, lots more than 50 people per class who are that kind of person, and they live in all of the other dorms. Just nowhere so concentrated and exclusive as Snitchcock. So if you see yourself as a Snitchcock kind of person, your second choice of dorm should probably be wherever you would choose if nothing like Snitchcock existed, because I doubt any of the remaining dorms really resembles Snitchcock meaningfully more than the others.
@JHS That’s exactly how I was feeling about Snitchcock. My assumption was that Snitchcock embodied that hyper intellectualism, but I feel like, as a student who is going there next year, I am going to get so much of that hyper intellectualism with my classes, daily conversations, and to a large extent (my planned extracurriculars) that I feel like I need a calm, relaxing, supportive place (where I am guaranteed to get a single), that is anti-frat, but not anti-social to the extent of Snitchcock. Besides, I feel like I am going to be around really really smart people anywhere on the campus. It wouldn’t be exclusive to Snitchcock. I might as well have a place to go that may be a good place to unwind from all the intellectual mumbo jumbo that I will be experiencing daily. A place where everyone is tight-knit, but may be a bit more relaxed than Snitchcock. I am nearly positive that I’m going with Burton-Judson. I just want that final confirmation that Burton-Judson is not a party dorm (which I have gotten the impression that it isn’t). It wouldn’t hurt to be able to have intellectual discussions and be around quirky people while being in the dorms, but I feel as though the dorms should be somewhat of a break from the stresses of school.
Don’t trust me, because (a) I am a parent of no-longer-very-recent graduates, whose perspective is inherently warped by being old, (b) the information I view through my distorted lens is getting pretty stale, and © I never knew much about Snitchcock anyway. One of my kids had zero friends there, the other had a handful, including a girlfriend for a while and a best-friend’s girlfriend. Grace Chapin, the original “UChicago” on CC, and a longtime poster as a student, was a four-year Snitchcock resident.
That said: Nothing I know tells me Snitchcock is “anti-social” or somehow stressful. That’s not my impression at all. I think it’s more a place where “social” means lots of people participating in some role-playing strategy game, or having tea and talking about Neil Gaiman, or plotting to recapture their Scavenger Hunt eminence, as opposed to pretending that they are at an Ohio State kegger. That’s what I meant by “anti-frat.” Not that it was anti-social, or opposed to fraternities, just that it tended to be social in ways that are different from the usual ways fraternities try to be social. (It’s nothing like substance-free, either.) And it tends to be very gung-ho on UChicago because everyone there committed after getting in EA. No one there is licking his or her wounds, wishing he or she had gotten off the waitlist at HYPS. And relatively more of the students are upperclassmen, who are long past that anyway.
@JHS Well, actually, that sounds quite appealing in terms of the social aspect. How much different would you think Burton-Judson is socially from that?
I know lots of people in Snitchcock who got in RD…
Snell has a reputation for being antisocial/never leaving their rooms. Hitchcock is not, to put it mildly. Hitchcock is (almost) all doubles, Snell is all singles. The impression I get from people I know in it/ the times I’ve hung out in there, Hitchcock is pretty similar to BJ.
@HydeSnark You’ve almost hit what I am trying to confirm here. So living in a single in Burton-Judson is the same thing as living in a double in Hitchcock (at least socially)? What is it that makes Hitchcock more like Burton-Judson than Snell? One not familiar with the inner social scenes of these residence halls might expect that Snell (being that it is all singles) would be closer to B-J than Hitchcock. Why is that not the case?
Yeah sort of. Snell is all the people who want to live on the quad and want as much privacy as possible. Hitchcock get a lot of people who want to live on the quad but are afraid of being isolated socially. They get different types. For some reason BJ seems immune to getting overwhelmed by people who don’t leave their rooms, though there are a fair number of them. I honestly am not sure why it works out like that.
@HydeSnark That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear. I’m 100% set on Burton-Judson now. Thank you.
Good choice