<p>I loveeee Harvard's housing system. I think it's such a great way to do things. </p>
<p>For anyone who doesn't know what it's like, freshman year you live in a randomly assigned dorm, and then you can "block" with some of your friends and basically you get put into the lottery together to get assigned to one of the 12 houses for sophomores, juniors, and seniors. You live in the same house the rest of your time at Harvard, and each house has a library, dining hall, and some even have interesting things like a pottery studio! </p>
<p>So what other colleges have systems like this or anything similar?</p>
<p>What’s unusual about Harvard – and, frankly, what most people who don’t go to Harvard don’t like about Harvard’s system – is that freshmen aren’t members of a particular house, that the assignments are made at the end of freshman year. Harvard people can tell you why that’s so great.</p>
<p>Colleges with universal residential college systems that make their assignments ab initio include Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Princeton, Rice, the University of Chicago, Penn, the University of Toronto, and (I think) Smith. There is a fairly weak voluntary system at Michigan. The systems at Chicago and (especially) Penn are also pretty weak because few upperclassmen reside in their houses or maintain a meaningful involvement as non-residents. At Toronto, some of the colleges are a lot more cohesive than others.</p>
<p>I would add that the end of Fr year assignments encourage tribalism more than others where students are assigned to a residential college from day one. It strikes me that those foster diversity more than what H’s House sytem has. Think of a randomized Hogwarts sorting hat.</p>
<p>^Smith has an awesome residential housing system. Each freshman is assigned to a “house” with a mix of freshmen, sophomore, juniors and seniors. You can stay put, or enter room draw and change houses. Each house has its own kitchen, complete with staff who will make you omelettes in the morning or a cake for your birthday. More than your major or what class you were in, your housemates are your family. When Smith women meet each other later in life, their first question is: what house were you in?</p>
<p>While Harvard and Yale’s residential house/college system is based on the Oxbridge system, the colleges at Oxbridge are actually quite different from the houses/colleges at H/Y. They’re basically semi-autonomous institutions of their own in a way that Harvard houses, or Yale colleges, or for that matter any of the residential houses at other colleges are not. You also choose to apply to a college from the get-go, as opposed to the university as a whole itself. [There is something called open-admissions, but most people choose a college to apply to]</p>
<p>Harvard’s system is randomized too. Students usually block with the friends they made from their freshman year dorm. And those freshman dorm assignments are every bit as random as at Yale or Hogwarts. There is further randomization when the blocking groups are assigned to their Houses. No one gets to pick their freshman dorm or freshman roommates, and no one gets to pick their House. The magic Harvard sorting hat does all that.</p>
<p>So it’s a two-step randomization process instead of one - with a student self-grouping process in between. Looking at the faces and interests of the kids scattered among the Houses, the result appears to be a fairly diverse bunch of kids in every House.</p>
<p>^^
Right. You are promised that your blocking mates will live in the same house, but that’s only 8 people (I think it’s 8 - maybe 12?). Then these blocks are thrown together with very varied blocks to create a relatively heterogeneous group (if you consider Harvard’s population to be heterogeneous to begin with). I don’t think this encourages “tribalism” at all. It guarantees that you will be living with a group of friends, and that there will be many such groups of different ilks living with you.</p>
<p>Some of us oldsters still have our perception of the Harvard system affected by the old days, when people applied individually to houses, and there were definite house characters that were perpetuated both by self-selection and by deliberate sculpting on the part of the houses picking among applicants. It was not completely unlike the Princeton eating club system – everyone was guaranteed a house placement, but some houses were extremely selective. Needless to say, this caused anxiety, and friends and roommates often found themselves flung in different directions.</p>
<p>Obviously, the current system is a huge improvement on that. (At least by my lights. I am sure there are still a few Eliot House alumni for whom the current system feels like Soviet-style socialism, and they can complain about it at Porcellian old-boy dinners.) But I still find it hard to believe that the process of forming blocks isn’t enormously stressful in spring of freshman year, at least for lots of people.</p>
<p>“But I still find it hard to believe that the process of forming blocks isn’t enormously stressful in spring of freshman year, at least for lots of people.”</p>
<p>JHS - You are right that some of the Harvard Houses still do vaguely retain the reputations they had back in the days when students applied as individuals - a system that was basically no better than, and just as exclusive as, a frat rush system (which is why they did away with it). Adams House is sometimes still thought of as the “artsy” House for example - a holdover from decades gone by. But the reality is that the computer makes sure that every House get its share of all types of kids.</p>
<p>And the reputations of the Houses do change over time. For example, by winning the intramural competition for several years in a row, Winthrop House has over the past four or five years developed a reputation as the Jock House - something that it never was back in the day. Actually the Winthrop students are no better or worse athletes than the others. It’s more that they developed a strong House spirit and culture based on competing for the glory of good ol’ Winthrop. So they win because they rack up a lot a points based on heavy participation rather than on actual talent.</p>
<p>So back to the original question- what other schools have similar systems, or are there any other schools where most people live on campus all 4 years?</p>
<p>^Look in the link provided back in post #2. Every college in the US that has a House/residential college system is listed there. Start your search with that list and find one that fits your academic and other needs.</p>