"The Kind of University We Desire to Become"

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
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<p>Worth Reading:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.uchicago.edu/pdfs/boyer_report.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.uchicago.edu/pdfs/boyer_report.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>As I've said many times before, the University has changed markedly in just the past 15 years or so. I'd argue that no other top school has changed as significantly as Chicago in this time period. (UPenn might be close, but I think Chicago is still on the ascendancy, whereas UPenn is stabilizing.) </p>

<p>I'm curious to see what the Chicago experience will be like say just 5-6 years from now. It's already vastly different than my time at the U of C (I graduated in 2000), and it seem like more positive changes are in the works for the next wave of prospective Chicago students.</p>

<p>Makes me proud to be an alum! :-)</p>

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<p>Also, I agree with Boyer's comments - we need to have about 70% of the student body living in college housing. Chicago should hope to have 2-3 more dorms built by 2016 or 2017 (right around the time the U of C hopefully gets a fair shot at hosting some of the Olympic games!).</p>

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<p>It's admirable that Boyer is trying to increase the percentage of students living in housing (I haven't read the whole report yet) but I don't know how successful the plan will be. Hyde Park apartments are a buyer's market, and the options are great for students. Also, I think a lot of students would rather live independently or with a few friends than live in housing. The social options can be better off-campus-- if you're not into congregating at a frat and too young to congregate at a bar, it's easier to meet at somebody's apartment than in a room in housing.</p>

<p>I would like to see Chicago's dorms centralized more (like Penn's Quads) but Chicago, like Penn, is an urban campus and Chicago, like Penn, like Columbia, like other urban schools, has to play within limited space. But even at a school where housing is well-organized and clustered together and there is space to build, many students move off-campus after first year. The last time I was at Cornell, they were in the process of building a brand-new dorm (Alice Cook House) to try to foster a sense of residential community. So housing life seems to be a universal college issue.</p>

<p>From my vantage point, I think Chicago is definitely rising. CC members, even ones that have no formal relation to the school, seem to know it and respect it (or even praise it!). The school is unusual and has a lot to offer.</p>

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<p>It is always extremely educational to read Dean Boyer's historical exigeses, and I respect enormously his judgment and his commitment to improving the quality of the college experience at Chicago. But that is an advocacy piece, not a measured assessment of the value of committing resources to undergraduate residences. There is another side to the story.</p>

<p>By way of background, my undergraduate experience was at Yale, whose housing system is generally the gold standard by which others' systems are measured. It is fascinating to learn that Chicago was attempting to create something like the Yale residential college system before Yale did, and that the principal administrative architect of the Yale system had come from Chicago. It is almost certainly the case that Chicago missed an opportunity there, and that the University would be far stronger today had it made a stronger commitment to this path 100 years ago. </p>

<p>But it is important to recognize that the Yale system has some enormous costs. One is its cost. Yale's budget for building two new residential colleges to house about 1,200 students is well over $1 billion, almost $100,000 per bed. Princeton just spent a similar amount to build Whitman College. That is what it costs to provide from scratch the kind of rich residential environment for which Yale is famous. Max Palevsky doesn't come close -- it registers to this Old Blue as the worst kind of uncreative, institutional dreck. The new dorm at Chicago may be better -- at least, its original plans seemed better, before cost overruns overran it. The second cost is more subtle, but ultimately perhaps more serious -- the lack of vitality in New Haven once one goes more than a few blocks from the Yale campus. Yale's monopolization of undergraduate housing sucks life out of the surrounding community. Finally, there are some psychic costs in creating a living environment where 98% of the people are between the ages of 18 and 22. I remember feeling how odd that was when I was in college, and I actively looked for contact with younger children and real adults.</p>

<p>Boyer states without qualification that Chicago's "academic peers" house a significantly greater proportion of their undergraduates, citing as examples Yale, Harvard, Brown, and Columbia. (He could have cited Stanford, too.) But he is awfully selective in choosing the peer group. Penn and Cornell house about the same percentage of undergraduates as Chicago, and I think Northwestern and Johns Hopkins are quite similar. </p>

<p>There are not so many peers that the unique circumstances of each do not come into play. Harvard, like Yale, has an enormous investment in undergraduate housing. Columbia (and Harvard, too), is located on the border between an extremely expensive, desirable residential market and one where undergraduates are loathe to live. Both universities' housing costs are well below market rates for equivalent housing in the relevant adjacent community. Stanford and Princeton are in a similar situation -- real estate prices in the surrounding community make affordable student housing a pipe dream (and at Stanford the design of the campus is such that if one is not living on campus, one is at least a couple miles away from anything). I don't know much about Brown -- I have never heard anyone wax sentimental about the housing there, and I don't know why so few students move off campus. Penn and Cornell, like Chicago, have an abundance of student-friendly housing in the areas immediately adjacent to their campuses, and a strong incentive to try to ensure the vitality of the surrounding community.</p>

<p>Boyer scoffs a bit at his forbears' aim that university housing afford a "wholesome" environment, but I don't think it is so easy to dismiss that concern. Once upon a time, universities really did function in loco parentis for undergraduate students, and housing rules served to isolate them from some of the dangers of normal life. I don't think that's true anymore, and I don't think anyone particularly wants it to be true anymore. Furthermore, in my children's world, moving off campus is one of the ways one affords oneself a healthier environment than the dorms provide: more peace and quiet, less public drunkenness, better food choices. Even at Yale, there are students -- my wife was one -- who really can't stomach the perpetual-party aspects of many of the colleges, and who move off campus to get some control over their environments.</p>

<p>Absent the wholesomeness rationale, it is not at all clear to me that student intellectual life is significantly enhanced by living in dorms. When students live off campus, they tend to live with other students, and next door to other students. They hardly lose contact with their peers. Nor do they separate from the university and its institutions. My children spend far more time on-campus than they do off-; my wife, despite being part of what was then only 5% of students living off campus, was something of a public figure because of her engagement in college political issues and the number of committees on which she served. A substantial portion of off-campus housing seems to arrange itself by loose activity-related affinity groups (or tight ones -- witness fraternities and sororities). I don't think you lose the benefits of a university community when people live with other students in private housing close to campus (as opposed to living with their families and commuting to campus from a distance).</p>

<p>Then there is also the question whether housing development and management is a business a university should want to be in, and one it can do efficiently. Maybe so, but there's lots of evidence that the answer is really maybe no. And there are certainly attractions to getting other people to put up the capital to build and to maintain the residences where your students will live.</p>

<p>None of this would matter if Hyde Park were so vibrant that students were getting priced out of the housing market. But I don't think that's the case. And the University desperately needs people in the surrounding community to invest in their properties, and in businesses that cater to student tastes. Yanking lots of students back inside the University walls isn't the best way to encourage that. And it may also diminish students' incentives to engage with the surrounding community, which to my mind would squander one of Chicago's attractive set of opportunities.</p>

<p>In the end, I think this is about marketing: a judgment that Chicago will not snatch students away from HYPS in large numbers unless it has better university housing, and that having everyone live in dorms longer will increase alumni support. But I don't think Chicago is or should be prepared to spend what it would take to really compete on that level. And I think it should not be that hard to make the case that Chicago's hybrid system has some advantages over the Yale coccoon model, and that students should affirmatively prefer it and take pride in it.</p>

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<p>S1 has a great apartment, cheaper and superior to a dorm in many ways. It will be a challenge to keep students in the dorms. Newer, cheaper, larger (living space) dorms will be required ...is that possible?</p>

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<p>^ Yup. For a little less than the price of a university double, all in, my daughter has spent the past two years in a huuuuuge pre-war two-bedroom with living room, dining area, kitchen, and a separate enclosed sun porch. And saved hundreds of dollars per quarter on food. It's a little run down, but by far the nicest student housing I have ever seen.</p>

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<p>Considering that Chicago is considering changing the meal plan options, effectively raising our costs by $2k/year compared to the option S would have chosen for next year, the economics of moving into the Hyde Park neighborhood are becoming more compelling.</p>

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<p>JHS - quick note, I think Boyer compares Chicago to Yale, Harvard, etc. precisely because these schools garner the type of alumni support and loyalty that most other institutions can only envy. In this piece, Boyer exhibits a desire to produce a happier, more loyal, and more committed group of Chicago students and alumni. I don't have any stats on this off hand, but I'm assuming that UPenn, Cornell, Hopkins, etc. have - at best - only comparable shows of alum support as Chicago. So Boyer is appropriately aiming at the "next tier" of schools as his target. </p>

<p>I also think that Chicago missed an opportunity to emulate Yale's residential college system, but again, as Boyer's report shows, Chicago did not (and still does not have) the abundance of resources necessary to create such a system. Hitchcock/Snell and Burton-Judson most closely emulate the college system found at Yale, but they are far cries from the experience at New Haven. Also, based on cost, Chicago just could not commit the sort of resources necessary to create superb housing.</p>

<p>On this front, I am curious to see if Chicago could have raised more money to build even more impressive dorms. Would it have been possible to spend say, $250 million (rather than the what? $80 million?) on Max Palevsky? Or $300 million instead of the $100 million for the new South Campus dorms? Does Chicago have the clout to raise this sort of cash for undergraduate housing? </p>

<p>One other note, my one problem with Boyer's report is this: Boyer seems to think that just providing BEDS is the solution. In my eyes, the comprehensive QUALITY of the dorms needs to improve, not just the number of beds. </p>

<p>Finally - unalove, the UPenn dorms aren't really all that centralized or cohesive. The freshman quads are great, but besides that, most of the dorms are seriously lacking. Many are dull high rises, and many are quite far apart (some dorms are on, say, 33rd and Chestnut, others on 40th and Spruce).</p>

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<p>I plan to get around to reading this at some point, but in response to JHS: why the hate towards Max-P?</p>

<p>Personally, I think the all first year idea is ill though out – to much partying, too little interaction with upper classmen who are culture bearers about what it takes to do well at the school – yet the building itself does not seem all that different at all to me vis-</p>

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<p>Cue7: I think it's good for Chicago to measure itself by the best competition, but I'm not certain that percentage of undergraduates living in university housing is the key metric. Others have said the same thing, a lot more succinctly than I have. Penn, by the way, has pretty terrific alumni support -- much better than Chicago's in any case.</p>

<p>The Penn high rises: look awful, but are surprisingly popular with students since their last spruce-up. With the exception of a couple, the Penn dorms all seem to be within a few blocks of one another -- basically between 36th and 40th, Sansom and Spruce. Blocks are much shorter here than in Chicago -- you can walk from one corner of that to the opposite one in under 10 minutes.</p>

<p>Yale vs. Max P.: Sorry, no contest. (I can't speak for Princeton -- haven't spent enough time there, and haven't been there at all since the much-admired Whitman opened for business.) In four years there, I never had a room without a common room and a fireplace, except my senior year when we had a set of 8 linked 15 x 15 singles with sensational views. (Another set of our friends had a three-story room with a living room, internal spiral staircase, and private rooftop deck.) Plus not having to go outside to eat, a cool library in the college, architectural detail everywhere . . . Max P. is a bunch of functional cinder-block dorms with cookie-cutter rooms and odd color accents, and it's tolerable because not much has broken yet. It's not special, it's just a dorm.</p>

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<p>JHS - interesting info. In terms of alumni support, the only metric I can think of is alumni giving, and is UPenn that ahead of Chicago in this regard? I'd imagine that what, 35% of Chicago grads give, whereas at Penn, maybe the number is around 40%? That seems like less of a gap than the, say, 60% you'd see at a Princeton. </p>

<p>Actually, another CC thread discusses this, and the numbers resemble what I have above:</p>

<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/569540-usnwr-2009-looking-top-strata-vi-alumni-giving.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-search-selection/569540-usnwr-2009-looking-top-strata-vi-alumni-giving.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Chicago is at 32% and Penn is at 38%. Again, not that great a difference, and not enough to justify your statement that Penn has "way better" alum support. Also, as more and more young alums become more and more satisfied with their Chicago experience, I think Chicago's giving rate will go up. Penn's character has remained quite similar for the past decade, and I doubt its alum giving will surge. </p>

<p>Also, perhaps I just had a different impression of the Penn undergrads, but during my time here as a grad student, the greek scene seemed to be a MUCH more significant component to undergrad life than the dorms. Outside of the freshman quads, which had a good sense of community, people generally seemed to focus their social life around the frats, rather than their residential houses. For kids living in the high rises, their dorm generally seemed to be just where they lived, not a significant part of their identity.</p>

<p>This of course contrasts starkly with the situation at Yale, where the residential colleges are central to virtually all aspects of undergraduate life.</p>

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<p>"It is not at all clear to me that student intellectual life is significantly enhanced by living in dorms" - JHS</p>

<p>I disagree. I think student social and intellectual life is greatly enhanced by the Chicago House system, perhaps more so in the more traditionally house-oriented dorms like BJ and Snell-Hitchcock, but in the newer ones as well. To me, the house table is an embodiment of everything that is unique about the social mores at Chicago - you sit down with people who you may or may not have known would be there at the same time as you, and you discuss everything from your HUM reading to Sex and the City with a certain level of sophistication and appreciation that (at least I believe) is pretty much unparalleled among American universities. When you return to your room at night, if you leave your door open, people from more backgrounds than you knew existed and with more interesting and unusual passions than you ever considered will wander inside and quite literally expand your mind. A lot of this sounds trite on an internet discussion board - you really have to experience life in the House System to understand.</p>

<p>When you're in an apartment, it becomes a little too easy to only spend time with your close friends. You no longer have the house table or the constant flow of discussion, and you no longer expose yourself to the inspiring influx of first years that renew and reinvent your house culture each year.</p>

<p>To me, the House System contributes as much to a Chicago education as the Core does, and when people ask me on tours what I dislike most about the University, I usually reply that I wish more upperclassmen stayed on campus.</p>

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<p>"...I usually reply that I wish more upperclassmen stayed on campus." </p>

<p>I concur completely. I felt that by my fourth year our class was completely atomized into small and relatively homogenous cliques, primarily along academic / cultural lines (e.g. the humanities hipster crowd, the science major cum tech junkie crowd, the want to get drunk and get the hell out of here crowd).</p>

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<p>"To me, the house table is an embodiment of everything that is unique about the social mores at Chicago - you sit down with people who you may or may not have known would be there at the same time as you, and you discuss everything from your HUM reading to Sex and the City with a certain level of sophistication and appreciation that (at least I believe) is pretty much unparalleled among American universities. When you return to your room at night, if you leave your door open, people from more backgrounds than you knew existed and with more interesting and unusual passions than you ever considered will wander inside and quite literally expand your mind."</p>

<p>As a first year in the College, I have to disagree with some of the points made. The House System actually creates cliques. At least in my experience, people tend to only associate with people who are like them within the House, like in any other campus. The manner in which people are put into Houses is also arbitrary done. I do not think that the campus housing takes into consideration the personalities of people when assigning them into houses. I think that if you are assigned to a House that does not fit you, as in my case your college experience can be affected negatively because so much of your social life depends on the personality of your house. I think that tour guides and such should really emphasize this to admitted students. Unfortunately, I had no idea that Houses played such a role in who you associate with.</p>

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<p>Indeed, the people one is thrown in with is extremely important and likely uncontrollable. A friend's D was miserable in Yale's house system, whereas a nephew loved it. It is all hard to predict. S1 liked his house and the people, but really enjoys living off campus as well. Most of his friends from the house now live off campus.</p>

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<p>The whole point is that you are forced to live with people who are different than you - and indeed that may mean someone being too loud when you are trying to study, or you being too outspoken about politics for another person's taste. </p>

<p>I absolutely loath elite schools that create "honors dorms" or "historically black houses" or whatever.</p>

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<p>I have to say that I adored my equivalent of the house table, which was my college dining hall. But I laughed a bit at the part about "the inspiring influx of first-years". By the time my friends and I were seniors, we had just about 0 interest in freshmen, unless they were exceptionally cute, and even then it was difficult to pretend to be paying attention for long.</p>

<p>And uchicagoalum is probably right that by fourth year people are mainly associating like with like. That's certainly true of my fourth-year kid, although that was also true when she was a third-quarter first-year. It's not true at all of my second-year, who also lives off-campus, but he has always been much more catholic in his associations. One of the great strengths of Yale's system is that off-campus students retain significant ties to their colleges. My wife only lived in our college for one semester -- she hated its then noisy, jocky character. (Thanks to the vagaries of random assignment, over the course of two years it morphed from English Majors On Acid to The Jock College.) However, she still had many friends there, and ate there or visited a few times a week, which is how we met. So, yeah, lots of benefit for me from that forced mingling of disparate types. I don't have the sense that, other than Snitchcock, the Chicago houses get a lot of loyalty from their ex-residents. But I'm not sure either of my kids ever felt deeply connected to his or her house. With a couple of exceptions in each case, that's not where they found their friends.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
As a first year in the College, I have to disagree with some of the points made. The House System actually creates cliques. At least in my experience, people tend to only associate with people who are like them within the House, like in any other campus.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Agreed. I'm not all that taken with the much-praised "social safety net" of the dorms. It may just be my experience in transfer dorms, but the people therein are split into groups just as they were in high school. And I find it difficult to connect with people I get along with in my classes/RSO's because they're usually wholly devoted to their intra-house cliques. The convenience of hanging out with someone two doors down from you trumps hanging out with anyone else, I guess. Maybe it's just a freshmen situation, but I find the insularity of the house system a little frustrating. There's little desire to integrate "outsiders" into the social structure. </p>

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<p>Sign me up as another person who has had mixed experiences with the house dynamic. My own complaint is that housing is too first-year oriented... every year, it's like "WHOA, LET'S PLAY BEER PONG BECAUSE WE'RE IN COLLEGE NOW!"</p>

<p>Chicago has challenged me to be aggressive socially-- be the person who does things, meets people, makes plans. This is not my usual role but it's one I've fallen into out of necessity. One of the benefits of off-campus life is that it's socially a lot more fluid-- I get invited to parties all the time from people who were not my housemates and the people I attend were not housemates either.</p>

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<p>oatmealia, I suspect/hope that by the end of the year you won't feel the same. With both of my kids, by spring they really only had a couple of people in their houses that they spent time with, and they were busily building their own social structures. At this point in their first years, however, that process was just beginning.</p>