We didn’t hear anything in any sessions about getting our choice of dorms. But then again, as someone suggested, we hear what we want to hear, and dorms not being a selling point for us, we heard more about the academics, faculty, and Chicago than dorms.
In the past, housing preference was the main carrot offered to EA admits to get them to commit before waiting to see how their outstanding RD applications went. That made sense, especially back in the day when (a) early admits made up about half the class, not three quarters of it, (b) all of the early admits were EA, and many did not commit before RD decisions were out, © there was a much more varied menu of dorms, most of which had some good points and some bad points relative to the others. Now it’s effectively one of many carrots offered to students to apply ED, and such a huge percentage of the class is selected on an ED basis that the few popular dorms are filled immediately. Also, the perceived difference between the “best” and “worst” dorms may be greater now. A decade ago, the only “new” dorm was Max P, and its shortcomings were very apparent. It was almost certainly the top choice of incoming first years, but probably half or more of the incoming students would have picked anywhere but Max P as their first choice.
@uocparent we only heard about dorms in the Housing Info Session (go figure), and housing absolutely wasn’t the “selling point” for my kid either. But I still contend that if the Director of Housing stands up in front of several hundred admits and their parents and all but promises something he can’t deliver, that’s a problem that the school needs to address in the next cycle.
“we only heard about dorms in the Housing Info Session”
Thinking back on our first official campus tour, the guide not only didn’t really talk much about housing, we didn’t even walk by many of the dorms much less go inside one. There was lengthy discussion of the Residential House system, but not actual dorms. She walked us by Snitch (and that was where she made the comments about how fun a place it was but how it filled up almost immediately so don’t count on getting in there) and MaxP, but only pointed at North in the distance. The tour didn’t cross the Midway so didn’t show BJ or South, nor did it venture East to I-House. Housing just wasn’t discussed much, nor did anyone ask questions about it other than if we were going to see inside an actual dorm room. Answer, “no.”
@JHS : As someone here pointed out, Brown dorms are really not one of the best. I have heard they are “uneven”. However, two best dorms are reserved for freshman class. This is the group which needs to concentrate on their study instead of worrying about other parts of college adjustment. Brown uses a “lottery” system. No priority/advantage for ED kids. I think the only real problem here is the distance to closest food. It is ridiculous to require anyone to walk 0.7 mile one way for food. In Tokyo, that is about the average distance between two subway stations (not JR, metro subway). One easy solution to have a van circling every 10 minutes from dorm to dining hall.
Come to think of it, during the tours of the schools that are considered tippy top, none of them showed us any dorms. The schools not considered tippy top (still private) did bring us into the newer dorms, and they were generic looking cinder blocks and a tiny space, but even that did not hamper our enthusiasm for that school. But recalling my personal visits to friends who did attend top tier schools, the dorms they were in were really old, and that did not hamper my admiration for those schools either. I think the atmosphere at those schools were so palpable, the dorms was just all part of it.
We were told verbally at Admitted Student weekend that having made our son’s deposit on Dec. 18 pretty much guaranteed him a single if that was what he wanted.
The UChicago website states:
“Housing applications for new students are prioritized by enrollment deposit date.
Assignments are also based on a number of other factors, including:
• Your hall and room type preferences
• Your personal/lifestyle preferences
• Specific roommate requests
• The availability of space in your preferred residence hall(s)
Each new student’s position in the room assignment process is determined by the date their enrollment deposit was recorded by Admissions. The earlier your deposit is made, the more likely you will be assigned to one of your preferred residence halls.”
However when my son contacted Housing after the assignment came out questioning his placement in a double rather than a single he was told something very different, “When we allocate housing, we first, and only, consider the residence hall a student preferences in making the initial placement and do this in date order of the enrollment deposit.”
So, even though there were singles available in other dorms, he was placed in a double in his first choice dorm. He stated very clearly in his application that he wanted a single room over anything else and was only ranking dorms and filling out roommate questions because it was required.
He/we suggested that the VP of Housing go back and review the way they talk about housing assignments to prospective/admitted students and if the printed information about placement is incorrect, to update it. Personally I think they made a mistake and didn’t read beyond the dorm ranking…I doubt any printed info will change.
I do understand the frustration, to say the process is “managed in a very personalized and intentional way” was not what our son experienced. My son followed the guidelines presented to him and was disappointed that those guidelines were not reflective of the actual process as he experienced it.
Nothing we can do - we’ve moved on, my son is talking with his roommate and has made plans for their room. Housing made a mistake in my mind - due to overcrowding most likely, due to not reading his application also likely. We hope he will like his double and that he and his roommate will co-exist without too much difficulty.
I suspect the housing office got crossed up by the changing landscape. Until a few years ago, there was almost 100% correspondence between dorms and singles vs. doubles for first year students. With the exception of Snitchcock, and maybe a few rooms in BJ, a first-year student in Dorms A-C was going to be in a single, and a first-year student in Dorms D-H was going to be in a double (or quad of two doubles). There wasn’t any meaningful gap between choice of dorm and type of room. So it worked perfectly well to assign kids to dorms first, then rooms.
But now that’s not the case, both because they brought North online, with both types of rooms for first years, and because persistent over-enrollment and removal of dorms from inventory have forced them to convert larger rooms in former all-singles dorms to doubles.
Of course, that explanation doesn’t exonerate them. It isn’t THAT hard actually to read the housing forms they ask kids to fill out, and to make appropriate adjustments, especially when you have eight months in which to do it. At any point between mid-December and mid-August, someone could have looked at his application, figured out that the placement was inappropriate, and bumped the latest-depositing kid in a single in his second-favorite dorm into a single in I-House. Or some other adjustment, with further repercussions. It would have taken someone fifteen minutes to figure out, maybe a couple of weeks to check the whole class. They should have done that.
I’m inclined to blame this on incompetence rather than malice.
A lot of the discussions I see here assume a degree of communication between departments that doesn’t actually exist. The University isn’t a coherent whole - it’s a collection of quasi-independent fiefdoms that happen to share an endowment and a president.
Dean Nondorf and his staff do their thing, and then sometime in the spring they tell Housing “We have a class of 1800.” Last year, they did their thing and gave Housing a larger-than-expected class of 2021, and Vue 53 house sprang into being at the last minute. This year, they gave Housing more of a heads-up, but still enrolled above and beyond the ability of housing to absorb students without drama.
I’m kind of surprised the horror stories have been about singles vs doubles and I-House placements, instead of Stony septuples built for four. I have it on good authority that there are at least a few of the latter.
I would not be surprised if this lack of communication runs both ways - with semi-frequent updates from Housing for the admissions people, and Admissions sending their talking points on housing to Housing for a look-over (and apparently a very cursory one) a few times a year, but little to no communication on a day-to-day basis.
The other possibility - and this is more speculative on my part - is that dorm assignments weren’t processed until the class of 2022 was finalized. This makes sense, to me, because there’s the possibility of roommate pairings changing the order of the housing queue. The sequence of events here would be, 1. Someone deposits April 30th, or gets off the waitlist in May; 2. They and a friend admitted in December list each other as roommates; 3. This bumps the ED/EA friend way down in the housing queue, and pushes everyone up a spot. Creating an assignment method or an algorithm that accounts for these changes after the fact, while respecting the queue order of everyone who’s already been assigned to a room, sounds like a hassle. So you just skip that and run the algorithm/do assignments by hand once the class of 2022 is set in stone. Which means Housing can’t know for sure what the availability of space in a specific dorm will look like until students’ choices are finalized.
The “crossed wires” hypothesis suggests a concerning - but all too believable - degree of organizational dysfunction. It sounds, in fact, like exactly the sort of thing you’d get from a massive bureaucratic organization in an area (housing assignments) that doesn’t tangibly and directly affect a major revenue stream. Especially when housing assignments will be long forgotten or dwarfed by other stuff (academics, extracurriculars, RSOs, house culture, whichever star professor the university flies out to meet alums) when the class of 2022 has enough money to write sizable donation checks - probably 30 or 40 years from now.
The “algorithm machine broke” hypothesis seems like a problem the College should solve - or minimize by estimating space in each dorm every so often - but might not want to; if admissions staff don’t have data on space by dorm, they can spin their general impression of things and leave it at that; if you give them data, positive spin becomes lying by omission.
Either way, there’s room for improvement.
Confused how the university can move kids seemingly last minute over to Vue53. What if it’s full up? Or does UChicago keep a block of rooms reserved just in case?
Vue 53 is overpriced for Hyde Park, and anyone willing to pay their price can get nice digs downtown for a comparable sum so they’re having trouble filling what units they have. Any student willing to pay that price can just move into Solstice on the Park instead.
Vue might make sense for students at Housing rates, especially with the $1500 rebate, and I assume the College got some sort of discount by leasing dozens of units at a time, but Vue 53 isn’t running out of space just yet. In fact, they’ve spent quite a bit on poorly targeted ads lately, in a bid to fill more units.
Yes, the college is using new dorms as bait and tout their #3 US News ranking to lure in status obsessed families who don’t value or care about what makes UChicago distinct. But my main issue is this:
That wasn’t honest! The honest way to say that would be: “ED/EAs and athletes who place their deposit in mid December are likely to receive one of their top 3 choices. Late EAs, RD, and waiting list admits will likely not get one of their top 3.”
As late as April (!!!) they were misleading families that a top 3 choice should still happen! And please stop acting as if everyone knew gap years, EDs and athletes fill all the prime housing spots. The college never told us that. Two, stop pretending giving all the prime housing to EDs and athletes is in any way fair! That preferential sorting is awful policy that stinks to the high heavens.
Lastly, if I-House and Stony are so great and it’s just an “illusion” they’re bad, why wasn’t the college forthright? Explain to RDs and late EAs, “You’ll most likely be placed in I-House or Stony Island, which costs the same as other freshman in premier housing, but you’ll have a REFRESHING 0.7 mile walk to food and 0.6-0.7 mile walk to the main quad. And no AC. You’ll love it!”
For those claiming it’s TOTALLY no big deal. Would you care if I moved your car and fridge 0.7 miles away from your front door? Would you THANK ME and report back about how REFRESHING and RELAXING that 1.4 mile walk to food is. Gimme a break. You’d be livid watching your neighbors hop in their car 5 steps from their door and noshing in their kitchens in their pajamas.
This is exactly what we were told, thus it sounds like a script, which establishes a pattern of deliberately misleading to secure commitments from bright students. I’d assume they figured yield could be jeopardized if they were transparent about housing that remained at that point. Very uncouth, very sleazy. Disappointing.
OK so is “most” 80%, 90%?..….that would leave a sizable number without a top 3 choice. ANYONE with any common sense knows they fill almost every possible space and that everyone getting into there top three is a ridiculous assumption, especially if your putting your deposit in April. You’d have to be utterly clueless to assume otherwise. I for one, recall no promises being made…
I’ll remove the central air from your house, park your car and fridge 0.7 miles away from your door, and you’ll still pay the same mortgage and utility payments. Would you complain? It’s not like you moved into that neighborhood for shallow reasons like convenient access to a fridge and AC, right? Just buy a bike, you’ll be fine! And hey, you could stand to lose a few pounds!
I decided to see how the mess known as UChicago Reddit was faring.
I stumbled across this:
I’m not saying folks in B-J would kill for that a system like that, but I’m not saying we wouldn’t either.
Kids at UChicago have it easy. Multiple buses and/or shuttles stop within a block of every dorm. These offer an easy option to access campus amenities, including the dining halls, when we don’t want to walk.
I distinctly remember walking half a mile to the bus stop and half a mile back through K-12. And yes, before you ask, it was uphill both ways.
The American suburban lifestyle is inefficient, unsustainable, and a historical anomaly. By prioritizing sprawl, McMansions, and food one drive-thru lane from home over walkable homes and amenities, town planners and architects have normalized a lifestyle unsustainable for more than a handful of people for a few short decades, and bred unrealistic consumer expectations. Meanwhile, in much of the world, people go about their lives without air-conditioning, three cars per family, or food on demand within feet of their rooms. Many do so by choice - a fact that would come as a shock to the average American. In this essay I will
Actually for students at BJ I have a question for you. When I walked by BJ today, I saw quite a few units with A/C. Are those units for RA only? Or can students install A/C in their rooms? Granted by the time of move in day, low for the night will sink to 50’s and there is no need for A/C. But last year there was a stretch in late September when the thermostat hit 90’s a few days in a row. I am just curious who can have A/C in BJ.
@85bears46 My daughter lives in BJ. The AC units are in the apartments of the Resident Heads (the adults in charge of the Houses) and the Resident Deans (the adults in charge of the dorm). From what my daughter told me, students can have AC if and only if they ADA certified.