Yale and Penn have housing systems that are both similar and dissimilar (of course!),
All three nominally have a residential college / house system that Chicago actually pioneered. At Yale, especially, it’s seen as wildly successful, the envy of all other elite colleges. (It’s also very successful at Harvard and Rice, and increasingly so at Princeton, which has spent hundreds of millions of dollars to create a similar system where none existed historically. Vassar, too, I believe, although the scale there is very different.) At Penn and Chicago, it’s nowhere near as successful, although Chicago seems dedicated to improving it. I’m not so sure about Penn – its penultimate president, who spent her career at Yale before her Penn appointment, tried to create a house system without spending any money, and my impression is it didn’t take and the current administration doesn’t care.
Anyway, at Yale, every student is associated with one of 12 (soon to be 14) residential colleges from the day of enrollment to graduation. About 75% of the freshmen live in all-freshmen dorms on one big block, but grouped by their college membership, and then move into their separate colleges as sophomores. The others live in their separate colleges from Day 1. The colleges average about 105 per class, with a range of 80-125. Each college has its own dining hall and a variety of other goodies – they are beautiful and elaborate, modeled after the Oxbridge colleges, with lots of interior courtyards and unique distinguishing features. Most were built in the 20s and 30s, and renovated recently at the cost of hundreds of millions per.
Each college has a resident faculty “Master,” a few apartments where other faculty and their families live, and all faculty members are formally associated with one or another of the colleges. Each college also has a separate Dean, and most academic advising and discipline is handled at the college level.
Most rooms are suites for multiple students with a common living area and multiple bedrooms. Almost all freshmen and most sophomores share bedrooms; juniors and seniors generally have a private bedroom. 90%+ of students live on-campus for their entire college career (unless they do study abroad). It is possible to switch colleges, but only a handful of people ever do that. People feel very tied to their colleges – witness, on CC, the number of people whose avatars are Yale residential college coats of arms – even if they didn’t live there (my wife, who lived in her college for only one semester before moving off campus, has her college’s decal on her car).
At Chicago, every student is initially associated with the “House” in which he or she lives, dating back to about 15 years before Yale instituted its system. In the past (but as of next fall, only vestigially), that House could be a whole building, but increasingly (and soon almost exclusively) it would be a floor or other separate area of a larger dorm, comprising up to eight different Houses. In theory, a student could live in that House all four years. In practice, the vast majority live on campus their first two years then move into nearby apartments in Hyde Park. (As noted often in this thread, the University does not have dorm space for much more than half its students, but that tends not to be a problem, because students are usually enthusiastic about moving off campus after a couple of years.) There is a fair amount of House-shifting by upperclassmen who stay on campus. Only two Houses, Snell and Hitchcock, which share a single dorm, have a strong tradition of four-year residency. (“Snitchcock”, with about 160 people in it, should be footnoted as an exception to most of what I say about UChicago housing.)
The Houses are much smaller than Yale colleges – I think the range is 60-100 people, total. Each House is assigned to one of three dining facilities for its meals, and has its own table there, although no one is required to eat at his or her House table. Each dining hall serves a population of about 1,300 people (including people who live off campus but still have a whole or partial meal plan). Houses tend to be very important social centers for first-years, but declining rapidly in that regard over time. Once people move off campus, they tend to have little to do with their former House. To some extent, activities are grouped by dorm rather than by House, and people may have more emotional engagement with their dorm than their House . . .although with the larger dorms, it’s completely possible to know very few people who aren’t in your house. The dorms other than the newest ones tend to have rooms that are uniform, or close to uniform. The newest dorms have a mixture of singles, doubles, and apartment-like suites. There are a fair number of small single rooms for first-year students who want them. Amenities like practice rooms and art studios are dorm-based, not allocated to the Houses.
Each larger dorm has a resident faculty member; each House an RA. Academic advising is handled by a central staff and departmental faculty; there’s no House affiliation
Penn: A motley variety of dorms, different in size and room configuration, but with mostly uniform rooms within a dorm. There are four large highrises with apartment-style suites, including small kitchens. Other than that, there are limited dining facilities in the dorms. A couple have small, limited-menu cafes, and there is one large dining commons. Penn’s meal plans basically force kids out into the community for lots of their meals anyway (which is not a terrible thing when you look at what’s available in the immediate surroundings as a result), and the on-campus eating options increasingly resemble off-campus ones (e.g., cafes where you can spend your meal account on a la carte items). A little more than a decade ago, each of the buildings was labeled a “College House.” They each got a Faculty Director and Dean (who generally don’t live there). Academic advising for residents is handled through the College Houses.
I believe only the highrises have any significant number of upperclassmen living there (but that’s meaningful, since the high rises represent a big chunk of total housing slots). Some of the College Houses are exclusively for freshmen; others exclusively for upperclassmen, so there’s a lot of movement between College Houses for students who live on campus. And Penn, like Chicago, only has dorm space for half its students. Unlike Chicago, it has not done much new dorm building (except it is building a new 350-bed dorm right now). Instead, it has induced private developers to build private dorms adjacent to the campus. As far as I can tell, students who move off campus generally maintain no connection to their former College House.