UChicago housing for incoming students?

Yes, roommate prioritized over dorm. What do you mean when you say equally committed? They wont place them together unless they mutually name each other on their applications.

@booklady123 - bad choice of words. Let’s try again: you are not confirmed roommates until both sign up and specify each other. That happens on the later enrollment date, not the first.

Whichever dorm they get, everything will be fine. It’s normal to obsess over the differences between dorms when you don’t have anything else to focus on, but in the end which dorm you get has little or no effect on whether you are happy or successful in college, and many of the factors high school kids at home use to determine which dorm they prefer turn out to be relatively insignificant by the end of October. That’s not to say that a particular dorm/house may not be a great or terrible experience, but what makes it a great or terrible experience has a lot more to do with which random kids wind up there than things like its bathroom configuration or how many blocks it is from the gym.

Both my kids got more or less the dorms they wanted (neither of which exists anymore). Both more or less hated their first-year dorms. The reasons they disliked their dorms had very little to do with the conventional wisdom about what the dorms’ good and bad points were, vs. not particularly liking their roommates or housemates. And not liking their dorms didn’t prevent either from having a great first year and a great overall college experience. Meanwhile, my daughter-in-law was in a different house in the same dorm as my son. She was unhappy about the assignment, but wound up loving it.

The only two dorms that can guarantee you a single are I-House and BJ, and BJ is superior to I-House in virtually every way.

Hear, hear.

And unlike I-House, B-J isn’t going to close anytime soon. With Woodlawn Residential Commons a done deal, and another dorm south of the Midway in the works, Stony/I-House could be on the chopping block in the medium term. Vue 53 is the top target, because those rooms cost Housing a small fortune (though they’re adding capacity in Vue this year, because the class of 2022 is even more oversubscribed than the class of 21). Two megadorms south of the Midway will have room for more than just refugees from Vue. I-House/Stony seem like clear candidates for closing.

@DunBoyer what are you hearing for Class of 2022 enrollment numbers?

@JBStillFlying I have it from a reliable source that we’ve deliberately enrolled more students than Housing can take - again. Nothing beyond that.

In the near term, this means singles in Woodlawn/B-J are being converted into doubles, Housing is spending a princely sum to lease more units in Vue 53, and the new dorm is going to be done quickly and on the cheap. A room is a room, so it’s not ideal but could be a lot worse.

What bothers me about this move is the effect on scheduling; the College is short on classroom and lab space as it is (and making 5-class quarters cost-neutral won’t help), so the only way to fit more sections in is to expand the day. The result is stuff like 7:30 PM labs on a Friday, marathon discussion sections at 8:30 AM, and so on. I’m pre-registered for a very interesting CIV sequence, which I’ve been looking forward to for two years, and this year the class has no discussion sections after 8 AM. It’s surreal.

Why are they over enrolling the class @DunBoyer ? Is a little more undergrad tuition revenue really going to move the needle for a school that has like $3 billion in expenditures a year?

@Cue7 I’m having trouble thinking of a reason that would make it worthwhile, because my (admittedly biased) perspective is that the administration hasn’t considered the effect on students’ experience.

My best guess is that the tuition from an extra 100 undergrads isn’t the driving force. I think the main goal is to have more alums (and thus more donors) in 2050. If those 100 undergrads a year include one future hedge fund manager, that’ll matter a lot more to the university’s bottom line than the extra tuition. This is all pure speculation on my part.

I don’t mind this in theory, because the difference between a college with 5900 students and one with 6300 or 6400 is small, all other things being equal - especially with the college’s small footprint relative to the grad schools. But with classrooms getting crowded and overbooked, all things aren’t equal. Besides the time crunch, I’ve been through some seminars where 2/3 of students fit at the table, and the rest sit in chairs along a wall somewhere (e.g. all three of my seminars this quarter). I have no idea if this is normal or a recent development, but the classrooms definitely seem crowded.

I’d be a lot happier with larger class sizes if all things were actually equal - including classroom saturation. If we’d built some new classrooms three years ago instead of asking college students to wake up at 7 AM, that would be…nice. But other capital expenditures (new dorms, Logan) seem to have taken precedence, so wake up at 7 AM we must.

No earlier riser moi (at least during my college years) but I can think of one thing worse than having to show up for an 8 am discussion section one day a week . . . . and that’s not to get the course at all. Esp. if I was looking forward to it. However - and not sure I’m looking at the same Civ sequence as @DunBoyer - the one I noticed has a lecture that is not only at a perfectly reasonable time of day but is, so far, only half-filled. Perhaps things will change during add-drop but it’s always possible that the scheduled lecture will now turn out to be more along the lines of a seminar. So perhaps the inconvenience of an early-morning discussion section can be offset with the pleasure of additional discussion with and more personal attention from the professor during the lecture time, making the entire experience worthwhile indeed. Hey, maybe it’s that 8 am discussion section that’ll make this happen, since avoiding any academic endeavor at that hour must be a common strategy for the uninterested (and there’s likely to be a very common number of those types). For all anyone knows, the prof. planned it this way.

Now to tackle that enrollment question. Here’s a preliminary stab:

Core Hum is required for all new students (first years and transfers) so using Class Search to count up the number of spaces available and/or filled is a great way to get an early headcount of incoming students. Not every class fills up, of course, but increases in capacity probably indicate a higher number of expected enrollees than the prior year. We don’t have Autumn 2018 Hum enrollment numbers yet because new student Pre-Reg. is still about two months out.* But we do have two years of history which can, perhaps, give us some hints of what’s to come:

Fall 2016 they filled 1,620 Hum spaces with 1,591 first years and 29 transfers; capacity was 1,764 spaces. Fall 2017 they filled 1,775 Hum spaces with 1,740 first years and 35 transfers; capacity was 1,860 spaces. So from Fall 2016 to Fall 2017, capacity increased 96 seats, and actual enrollment increased by 155.

The capacity increase no doubt had to be based on an expected larger class. However, the actual increase exceeded expectations since we know they had to scurry to arrange for the Vue53 option. Just a guess, but perhaps the 59 student difference between actual increase and capacity increase is a good indication of how much over-enrollment they truly experienced. They’d naturally NOT want the same thing to happen this year, although it’s very possible that Vue53 is now considered to be their temporary solution till the new dorm is up and so they plan to keep increasing enrollment. If so, we’d expect to see an increase in capacity for Autumn 2018 Hum.

And that is just what we see, at least at this point. It looks like they’ve added several more sections of Hum and that capacity is up 174 over last year’s capacity number. It’s too early to make any specific conclusions; for instance, the Hum schedules in particular might not be set in stone for several more weeks yet. Also, they may be overestimating a bit more than usual, given what happened last year. Still - that’s a sizable increase! It doesn’t suggest a plan to hold steady at last year’s numbers.

  • So far there seem to be four enrollees - these might be returning students who, for whatever reason, received permission to (re) take Hum after their first year at UChicago.

Some of these gripes are perennial, @DunBoyer . A principle is at work at the University of Chicago dictating that there will always be an insufficiency of all desirable things, thereby enhancing their desirability.

In 1963, when the entering class was less than half the size of the present one, two of my first-year classes had the same configuration you described - a seminar table ringed by chairs. This made for an interesting sort of dynamic as between those who chose to sit with the inner circle around the Prof at the table and those who chose to hold themselves aloof on the perimeter. I could detect inflections of character and sensibility in that choice. The outliers tended to hold their fire during the early stages of a discussion. They let the people at the table do the initial skirmishing on the smaller points of, say, just how the eye moves through “Guernica” or where precisely the development section of the first movement of the Jupiter Symphony begins. There was a chattiness at the Table, a plethora of precise observations and a sharing of assumptions. But the outriders on the Ring, like the brass at the back of the orchestra, had their own role. They bided their time, and eventually from them came questions and observations such as: “Does the eye move at all through a painting, or do we take it in as a single gestalt?” Or, “What does it add to our experience of music that we recognize its structure?” Those questions deepened the discussion. You could say that a dialogue started up between brass and strings, or that polyphony replaced homophony. The Table needed the Ring’s distance and skepticism, and the Ring needed the Table’s loquacity and technical precision. The nice question is whether in the absence of the architecture of the classroom that sort of interaction of divergent sensibilities would have developed, or developed quite so well.

These classes occurred in old Lexington Hall, a ramshackle single-story structure that was once a dining hall, wedged in between Rockefeller Chapel, the Oriental Institute and the President’s House, functioning as the HQ for HUM gen ed (later called the Core). The floors sagged and squeaked, the roof leaked, the rads knocked, it was cold in winter and hot in spring. I won’t say that a genius designed the place or planned the pedagogical effect of the classrooms. However, all that insufficiency - to return to my point here - was hardly noticed by any of us in those classrooms once a good discussion got rolling. I’m inclined to believe there’s a correlation, even causation, between insufficiency and intellectual achievement. Plato thought so.

The capacity increase exceeded some people’s expectations; Dean Nondorf wasn’t one of them. I’m told he kept taking people off the waitlist after we exceeded whatever class size the university shared internally - which suggests our class size last year was part of some plan known to Dean Nondorf.

The problem is that nobody bothered to share this plan with Housing, so they had to adjust at the last minute to an enrollment increase months in the making. Everyone expected an increase, but Nondorf didn’t let Housing know he was going to take as many students as he did off the waitlist. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the case for other divisions - including the Humanities.

Probably students who had to take a leave of absence during their first quarter - due to mental health, personal reasons, or some other unexpected circumstance. Life happens.

^^ @DunBoyer - could very well be on all your points. The 2017 enrollment numbers relative to capacity are higher than for 2016. That could suggest it was either a breakout year for Class of 2021 or Nondorf went renegade. Either case, there might have been several departments taken off guard. Will there be surprises this time? Capacity has really jumped so they are either planning a sizable increase or really playing it safe.

There are probably a few each year who need to reboot Hum. That’s not obvious now from past data but is for the upcoming fall term since we are in between pre registrations at this moment. Those perusing the enrollment data might notice and wonder which is why I mentioned it earlier. It’s great that the College allows that second chance.

Several divisions have been told to expect the latter, and are planning for it already. Vue 53 was announced in July last year, so that puts them way ahead of last year’s timeline.

I assume Nondorf did what he did with the blessing of the higher-ups, but due to an organizational SNAFU the powers that be forgot to notify half the divisions involved.

Just curious here. In 2016 - a time of more stable enrollments compared to last year, LOL - a little less than 92% of capacity in HUM was utilized. Last year it was almost 95.5%; assuming that was an outlier (due to calling multiple students off the waitlist, for instance), then would enrollments fall back to 92% of capacity again? If so that could mean about 1,870 new students. How many would be newly-admitted first years? How many would be transfers? How many would be deferreds from last year’s wait-pool (several were admitted to class of 2022). Most importantly, could it be the case that there are over 1,800 newly-admitted first years who enroll? That’s a yield closer to 80% than 75%. Who thinks this is happening? That just seems crazy and yet they have added all that capacity . . . .

wow @JBStillFlying this was prophetic.

Is tomorrow the day assignments are posted? How are they sent? Portal? Email?

RAs and orientation aides were told that housing assignments will be posted tomorrow.

These will presumably show up on the my.uchicago portal. That’s how they did it two years ago, anyway.

Thanks!