I agree with you 99%. My son is stuck and miserable in ihouse though, and he is an athlete. He was a RD athlete, because he didn’t look at UChicago until Dec of his senior year. All of his teammates are in North, and they were all ED. The biggest problem, IMO, is that kids who are stuck in a dorm they hate don’t make as much of an effort to meet the other kids in the dorm, because they pray every day for a housing change. The “House system” is useless for kids who think they are leaving to join a different house. My son eats alone, when he doesn’t ride his bike up to eat with his friends at North, and it breaks my heart. Someone who is worried about the #3 ranking should do a study on the retention rate of students who get stuck in a miserable housing situation, as compared with the students who get good dorms. 15 minutes to breakfast in the snow is hard to get past.
On the positive side, the doubles are quite nice and large.
Also, I believe DunBoyer mentioned the different departments working as separate entities. All of the departments that I have been in contact with have been absolutely wonderful, except for housing. My son went with a teammate to the desk at North, to borrow an iron, and they got such a crazy response that they looked around to see if there was a camera filming for Impractical Jokers! Somebody from the PR department needs to do a seminar with the entire housing department. Housing is where students spend the majority of their time, not classes, sports, libraries, dining, or any of the other great pieces of the UChicago life. It is unfortunate that is is such a negative experience for so many freshman.
how many 1st years are actually having a negative experience? @tennismom7 I’m so sorry to hear that your son doesn’t enjoy I-House. Does he get along with his roomate?
I called out admissions counselor the day before I paid the deposit in April, and I was ABSOLUTELY told that it was very rare not to get one of your top 3 choices!!
Yes, his roomie is good and the room size Is better than the other dorms! Honestly, ihouse isn’t perfect, but if it was closer to dining and campus, the other issues would be petty.
My daughter is in IHouse and seems to be doing fine. She eats at her house table with other students in her house even if they didnt arrive together and is getting involved in house activities and spending time with girls on her floor. What is so terrible about this dorm other than the location? Legit question - not trying to be snarky. I think it is what you make it. Yes, the walk to the dining hall is a negative, but learning to make the best of a less than ideal situation is a great life skill. A parent on the class of 2022 parent facebook page submitted a petition and has been in contact with the director of dining services who says they are looking into working something out for IHouse students. Again, not holding my breath, but maybe they will come up with an option that helps our kids get some breakfast. I’m also curious if this was such a big issue last year? Any of you non-newbies know?
Kathy V, I don’t remember it being an issue last year, or the year before, at least not on CC or at the events we attended after housing assignments were announced. I do recall my DD mentioning that someone on the Class of 2020 fb page expressed concern about being assigned to IHouse since they were not an international student, and was relieved to find out that was not a requirement to live there.
My daughter met kids in her class (Class of '21) who were not happy at all about being in I-House but that was at the beginning of the year last year. She doesn’t know whether or how it was resolved. And she’s met kids in other dorms who weren’t happy either. No dorm is immune. However, the problem is likely to be found more in I-House than other res. halls.
It is rare not to get one of your top 3 choices. I absolutely pinky promise. You are just making very incorrect assumptions about what other people choose, and about the distribution of first years across different dorms.
@“Kathy V” you will get infinitely more accurate opinions on I-House from asking your daughter than from asking anyone on College Confidential
One of the reasons why it’s rare not to get one of your top three choices is that 70%+ of the class is being admitted early. Essentially all of them are getting one of their top three choices, since they pick first. (The exception is the ED kid who asked to room with a specific person who was an RD admit, not realizing that doing so made him an honorary late-depositing RD for housing purposes.) Some portion of the RD admits are also getting one of their top three choices, especially those who really wanted a single and therefore put I-House as one of their top three choices.
Betweeen one thing and another, probably 85-90% of kids get one of their top three choices, which justifies calling it “rare” when that doesn’t happen. The problem is that it’s not necessarily rare for kids admitted RD (or EA, for that matter) who don’t commit until mid-April or later and who don’t include I-House as one of their top three choices not to get one of their top three choices. I-House represents something like 20% of the beds available to first years, maybe more, and I don’t think it’s likely a top-three choice of enough students to fill it. There’s nothing anyone can do about that at the moment, but they shouldn’t actively deceive kids.
The athlete issue is a compounding problem. In my kids’ day, there wasn’t a clear choice for athletes’ dorm. They were distributed among Max P., Pierce, and, if they wanted a single, Maclean, and they ate at Bartlett or Pierce. I feel bad for the one kid in a class of new recruits who gets placed in a dorm a mile away from all of his teammates, who are together in one dorm. On the other hand, I hate hearing that all the recruited athletes are together in one dorm. That’s not healthy for the civic life of the college. I understand why that’s happening, and that in all likelihood no one ever made a decision to put all the recruited athletes in the same dorm. However, if that’s a predictable consequence of the current rules then someone needs to think about changing the rules.
My niece, class of '22, is a D-1 athlete at an Ivy and they do NOT dorm her with her team or other 1st year members of her team, and that was according to plan. They are dispersed throughout the dorm system just like any other first year student. I don’t even believe she got to choose her dorm.
Who says they haven’t thought about changing the rules?
I-House is not 20% of the beds available to first years. It’s less than 10%. Frankly it isn’t true that it’s common for people who applied RD to not get one of their top choices - and there are plenty of people (even people who apply ED, shocker), who put down I-House. Many of these conclusions are made out of the incorrect assumption that everyone in I-House doesn’t want to be there.
Regardless the whole idea of having housing priority based on deposit date is silly and outdated. Clearly the university needs no help getting people to deposit.
@JHS North is twice as big as Pierce and Maclean combined - and in the bad old days unlucky people might end up in Broadview or, in the really bad old days, Pierce.
What changed is dorm consolidation. Now the differences between dorms are minuscule (and there are less choices despite more beds) which ends up shining a spotlight on relatively minor differences. And it leads to very similar choices on the part of the first years, which makes you wonder why they’re even bothering to ask for preferences.
I was not an undergrad in my days at U of C but God forbid you were assigned to Shoreland with no frequent shuttle like UGo now. It was half an hour walk from Shoreland to the Main Quad one way.
We need @marlowe1 for more perspectives of the dark old days 
Oops yeah - meant to say the Shoreland, not Pierce
Is Shoreland fixed up now because those appt’s are renting for something like $1600/mo for a glorified studio . . .
Yes they gutted the inside
In the old days, i.e., until 4 or 5 years ago, the college housing website told you how many undergraduate beds there were in each dorm. They no longer provide that information.
North may be twice as big as Pierce and Maclean combined, but they also decommissioned Broadview, Breckinridge, and Blackstone, right? North added net beds, but not that many. GG (South) added fewer than 100 net beds when it was constructed. Before South was built, college classes were running around 1400 people, and dorm capacity was under 3000. Today’s complement of dorms has to house 1800+ first years plus a larger number of second-fourth years than they did 10 years ago. I think I-House (and Vue 53) represents the majority of the additional space necessary to accomplish that.
There are five houses in I-House. To me, that means about 400-450 students, more or less. At least half will be first-years, and, yes, I suspect more than half will be first years because fewer upperclass students will choose to remain in I-House rather than moving off campus than may be the case in the glitzier new dorms or the more-character old dorms. So while my 20% is clearly too high – at this point, that would mean at least 360 first years, which is probably not the case – “less than 10%” is certainly a lowball. (My 20% estimate, when I reconstructed it, included Stony. It was supposed to be an estimate of what percentage of the entering class had to live in the dorms people were dissing all the time. It was probably still too high, but not by that much.)
Based on the overall number of houses – 38, not counting Vue 53, which has no first-years – I-House would represent about 13% of the students in housing (and Stony would be another 3%). I know the B-J and Snitchcock houses are below-average in size, however, and are effectively capped by the physical design of the dorms. Plus they have a high retention rate for upperclassmen.
By the way, I don’t assume no one wants to be in I-House, or that no one wants to stay in I-House. I actually like I-House. It’s fine for the people there. I think, however, that there are objective reasons to believe that it is not high on the lists of many incoming first-years, and that it has fewer upper-class students than most of the other dorms.
– Entering college students waaaay overvalue things like distance to the library, the gym, and dining halls.
– The majority of entering college students, for reasons I don’t fully understand, seems to prefer doubles to singles.
– For those who prefer a single, I-House has just about no advantages compared to the other possibilities, which are cuter or glitzier, and much closer to everything anyone cares about. So I doubt I-House tops many lists.
– The new dorms were much more designed for current student tastes than any of the old dorms, including I-House.
– A large percentage of entering college students has a totally irrational fear of communal bathrooms, which is what I-House has. Moreover, even if you don’t mind communal bathrooms, you could mind the fact that in I-House many people have a loooong walk to their communal bathroom. Which is probably gender neutral, something many entering college students also fear irrationally. But at I-House, if the bathrooms aren’t gender neutral, it means many people will have really, really long walks, involving stairs, to take a shower. Unless they do single-sex floors.
– Given the prices being charged, the uniformity of its rooms, and its distance from lots of things, there really isn’t much advantage to staying in I-House vs. moving off campus after first or second year.
– Its one great location advantage is convenience to the Metra, but that has been devalued considerably by everyone getting CTA cards.
It took years before The Shoreland re-opened. It was sold in 2004 for very little, and leased back on a short-term basis. It was closed as a dorm in June 2009, and I think it’s only few years ago that it came on the market as a rental building. It was originally supposed to be fewer, larger condos, but apparently that was abandoned.
There are no significant retention differences by dorm (except Max). The differences are house by house. Retention is almost entirely determined by factors besides dorms - % of first years (who are most likely to stay), how involved that group of first years are, whether RAs and RHs are staying, etc. The only physical factor that matters really is room type - people want to stay more for singles and apartments - but that doesn’t ding I-House and really we only see it with Max almost total lack of singles.
The advantage of staying is that you stay with your house. Realistically the decision to stay comes down to social factors and $$$ in the end. People aren’t just as unwilling (or willing, depends on how you look at it) to stay in storied old dorms or “glitzy” (hardly) new dorms as to stay in I-House. To be honest I think the reason more people are staying in housing is more of a function of rents in Hyde Park rising and the student body getting richer than anything about housing itself.
I-House has small houses, like BJ. Singles are space inefficient.
“A large percentage of entering college students has a totally irrational fear of communal bathrooms, which is what I-House has. Moreover, even if you don’t mind communal bathrooms, you could mind the fact that in I-House many people have a loooong walk to their communal bathroom. Which is probably gender neutral, something many entering college students also fear irrationally. But at I-House, if the bathrooms aren’t gender neutral, it means many people will have really, really long walks, involving stairs, to take a shower. Unless they do single-sex floors.”
I thought they did actually do single sex floors as recently as a few years ago but haven’t heard whether that’s still the case.
One thing that was jarring about I-House when I was a grad student there wasn’t the communal bathrooms but the utter lack of privacy while showering. Group showers is where I draw the line LOL. We had a rather uncomplimentary name for them which I won’t mention here. Hopefully the bathrooms have been updated with individual stalls, etc.
My daughter’s floor (or maybe just “wing”) in IHouse is single sex. Her communal bathroom does have shower stalls and each stall has a small dressing area. For her at least the bathroom is only 4 or 5 doors down the hall.