<p>The term “residential college system” is not well defined. Some colleges just have different residence dorms but have the same graduation requirements. Some colleges have different graduation requirements (besides major requirements) but don’t care where students live. UCSD is an example.</p>
<p>Sorry for the confusion about Vassar. Or my confusion – I confused it with Smith, and didn’t bother to look it up.</p>
<p>The University of Chicago absolutely does have a residential college system, one that antedates Yale’s and Harvard’s. But it doesn’t have nearly the same effect because the majority of students move off campus by their third year, and almost all of them by their fourth year.</p>
<p>Another huge difference between Yale and Harvard (and Princeton) and the rest of the world is that their colleges/houses have a wide variety of rooms, a huge amount of amenities (theaters, athletic facilities, libraries, practice studios), and their own dining halls. It’s wonderful for the students, and hugely inefficient. When the University of Chicago built a new dorm recently, with eight houses, and space for about 800 students, it spent about $100 million. On a per-student basis, Yale is spending more than five times that amount to build two new residential colleges (and that’s before the operational inefficiencies are taken into account). It’s nearly impossible for any university to duplicate the features that make the Yale and Harvard systems so successful.</p>
<p>At Harvard there was really only one professor (or a married pair) in each house, but other faculty were associated with the house. The ones I remember were Robert Lowell who would come and eat dinner occasionally and a French professor who came regularly for French table. There were grad students in each entry way (like floors only vertical) and a pre-med and pre-law advisor who lived in the House as well. Our basement had seven squash courts, a grill, a bunch of music practice rooms, a pottery studio and a big area with ping pong, foosball and pinball machines. Upstairs we had a small library, and a junior and senior common room which could be used for meetings.</p>
<p>Jhs. Tsk tsk</p>
<p>At UVa, there is Brown - which is popular with some eccentric and artsy students, and Hereford, which I understand mainly attracts loners who like single rooms. Hereford was rather unsuccessful modern architecture of the late 1980s. There also are language houses. There also is the International Residential College, which is something like 50% international students, and also serves many international exchange students.</p>
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<p>I don’t know about H&P, but one thing that I kinda missed on the Y campus was a central Student Union with food, coffee, entertainment, meeting space, etc. Since all the RCs have the facilities listed by JHS, these types of things are dispersed which has both pros and cons.</p>
<p>I never missed a central student union, but I gather it’s been a sticking point since - so yes pros and cons.The whole point of residential colleges is to create smaller learning communities within the larger institution of a size where you really can get to know everyone (if you want to), but still large enough to have a critical mass of all interests. My biggest quibble with the whole system is more architectural - I think entry ways don’t work nearly as well as floors for meeting people and I think suites are also not very conducive to getting to know people outside of you immediate friendship group. But I’m saying this as someone who in retrospect made a bunch of huge mistakes on the rooming situation front.</p>
<p>That was a question that I had, as well. How do you build any sense of a greater community if, from the get-go, everyone is ensconced in residential colleges that are self-contained with respect to dining and entertainment facilities? I get that the dining facility situation isn’t much different from campuses where there are X number of large dorms, each with their own dining hall, but for entertainment facilities, does it really work that well if the bowling alley only belongs to X Residential College versus being in a shared student union type of facility?</p>
<p>In the res college system I am familiar with, there are simply X number of dining halls on campus, and the res colleges are just like any other dorm in that regard. If I’m not mistaken, one res college is large enough that it has its own dining hall - but some smaller dorms right next to it eat at that dining hall too. My son’s res college is too small to support a dining hall, so he eats at a nearby dorm dining hall. I suppose this does less in terms of building a true res college community in the “I was in Eliot House!” sense, but by the same token it means that friendship groups are more easily expanded beyond the res college when you’ve got several dorms / living spaces eating together.</p>
<p>I can only speak for myself. I had three groups of friends. The ones in my house, the ones in my department and the ones on the literary magazine. That was more than enough. The house system changed while I was there. Originally each house had a reputation and you put in an ordered list - there was the artsy/literature house, the jock house, the various preppy houses, the music/druggie house etc. Then they decided that was bad and houses were assigned randomly. Probably a better thing. But the point I believe was that residential colleges were big enough that it wasn’t the end of the world if most of your friends came from them. The idea was that the intimacy would create bonds and intellectual conversations and synergy. (I experienced this much more in prep school - especially my senior year when I was a border - much more than in college BTW.)</p>
<p>How big are these residential colleges (in terms of # of students)? The reason I ask is that one of the things about the Greek system that always gets dinged is the concept that your friends all (supposedly) “have” to be from the same house – but what you’re describing feels at a similar level of intensity, if not greater, if you are all eating together AND doing recreational activities together in facilities that are set aside only for you (as opposed to doing recreational activities in facilities that are meant for the whole campus to use).</p>
<p>I think that there are a lot of similarities but houses are bigger. Harvard has 12 houses and 6700 undergrades 90% or so who live on campus - so that’s a little over 500 per house. It gives Harvard more of an LAC feel I think while still having the advantages of a bigger research university.</p>
<p>My college at Yale had about 125 people per class, or 500 overall, with 350 living in the college, 125 freshmen across the street on the Old Campus (in my year, literally right across the street – my bedroom window overlooked my college – but the next year Old Campus dorm assignments changed), and maybe 25 upperclassmen (including my future spouse) living off campus but within walking distance. For reference, that was roughly the size of Haverford at the time. The colleges varied in size somewhat, and that was a tad bigger than average. The largest, Silliman, had about 160 per class and all four classes lived in the college.</p>
<p>At the time (mid-70s), Yale’s colleges had been randomly assigned for a number of years, and everyone liked that system. The identities of the colleges were very fluid. When I was a freshman, my college had a distinct English Majors On Acid reputation, but due to some luck of the draw in my class and the two classes on either side, by the time I graduated we were the Jock College (thanks to a couple of Olympic athletes and a larger than average number of starting football players, including successive captains).</p>
<p>Like mathmom at Harvard, my friends came from my college, my classes (my major, but also two special programs I was in), and extracurricular activities. Also, just random stuff. I had several high school classmates and fellow alumni from other classes there, and so did many of my college friends (even my roommate from a public school in Billings, Montana, had a classmate there), so people’s networks intertwined. (For example, my future spouse was friends with my roommate’s high school classmate, but didn’t know this roommate at all; the roommate’s first college girlfriend was someone he met because she had been the high school best friends with my 11th-grade girlfriend – who didn’t go to my school – and one of my cousins.)</p>
<p>My residential college friends were a really varied lot – a whole bunch of pre-meds, engineers, jocks, lots of history majors, hard-core feminists, one member of Skull and Bones, and at least one drug dealer. It wasn’t just classmates; some of my college friends came from our intramural soccer team, our tang team (speed beer guzzling), a college-based madrigal group, or just sharing a bathroom. The college dining room was really, really pleasant; it wasn’t uncommon to hang out there for an hour and a half or two hours around any meal if you didn’t have something specific to do, drinking coffee and talking to shifting groups of whoever was around.</p>
<p>Community across the whole college (not residential college) was fostered by having most of the freshman living in proximity to one another on the Old Campus and eating meals together during the work week at Commons (which was cavernous and off-putting, but always a place you could meet people), classes (of course), the gym, the library, and various large organizations like the Glee Club (and a cappella singing groups), the Orchestra (and lots of pick-up chamber groups), the newspaper, the Dramat, Dwight Hall (a social-service umbrella), a few clubs . . . and the natural sociability of 18-22 year-olds.</p>
<p>It was easy, then, to visit people in other colleges and eat in their dining halls. They didn’t even start locking the college gates at night until I was a junior. You weren’t limited to your college by any means.</p>
<p>I’ll just add to what JHS posted to say that my experience at Yale was very similar. I would say that it’s largely the same now, although I would say there is more interaction between colleges than there was in my day. Students are much more likely, for example, to eat in other college dining halls than we did. I think the system works well socially, because you get to know people with shared interests through ECs and classes–but you also get to know a lot of people with different interests because they are part of your college “family.”</p>
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<p>D1’s closest friend’s, whom she still sees regularly several years post graduation from Harvard, all came from her freshman dorm. Those eight girls then blocked together and thus were assigned to the same House for the final three years. She has other good friends from her House who were from other frosh dorms, but they are not as close as those friends she picked up her freshman year. She also has good college friends from her college ECs as well - musical and other performing ensembles she took part in.</p>
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<p>D1’s House had its own dining hall (and its own library), and I think all the other Houses did too. It was theoretically possible to eat elsewhere, but it seemed to me that kids mostly ate in their own House dining hall, particularly for dinner.</p>
<p>Dartmouth does not have a residential House system. It’s unusual academic schedule, of having random quarters off-campus and required summer school your sophomore year, is not really conducive to maintaining continuity of living in one place with the same group of kids. So instead it has regular dorms plus a bunch of residential Greek houses. So D2’s college living experience has been far different from her sister’s. Each system has its pros and cons, but overall I think the residential college system provides a better experience. </p>
<p>I doubt Dartmouth will ever switch over to the college system though. For one thing I don’t think they could afford to put up the new buildings that would be required. And the powerful ex-frat alumni (i.e. donors) would never support anything that undermines the power and primacy of their old Greek houses.</p>
<p>Very interesting. I think what I’m thinking of as residential colleges (in my experience observing them and in my son’s experience living in one) are “residential colleges lite” – an intensified theme dorm with some specific social activities to build camaraderie – rather than the true, all-encompassing, this-is-my-home-within-the-college that some of you are describing.</p>
<p>JHS, point about freshman not living in the Yale colleges reminds me that Freshman aren’t living in the Harvard houses either. So about 400 per house and closer to 300 in my day.</p>
<p>When I took DS to a Yale info session what I liked was the explanation of the residential colleges and the competition between them in intramural sports and otherwise. He gave an example of how when Yale played Harvard in football, they would be rooting against Harvard but also if a player from your residential college did something good, that was cheered, or if someone from a different residential college made a mistake, that was cheered as well (or something like that). Although UCSD and UCSC have residential colleges, when we toured I didn’t get the sense of the camaraderie with them like I did from the Yale rep.</p>
<p>I get that these residential colleges may have shared activities, such as intramural sports, or parties / formal events for residents of that res college, etc. Upthread, the idea of dedicated recreational facilities was mentioned. What are some of the types of recreational facilities that these res colleges have contained in their living quarters that are intended exclusively or primarily for that res college, and are invitation-only for everyone else? I’m not familiar with dorms or res colleges that really have “facilities” for their specific use, beyond common space lounges and things of that nature.</p>
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Most (all?) of them at Yale have a rec room/TV room/game room, which may also serve food. They all have libraries. Some have small theaters, or dance studios, or darkrooms, or printing presses, music practice rooms, exercise rooms, recording studios. They are probably mostly used by the students in the college–but primarily because they are living right there. I think what really makes them into communities is the dining hall and the organizational structure–the freshman counselors, the Master and Dean, the advisors, etc. Each college has its own student organization that sets up social events, etc.</p>
<p>You can look at the Yale college dining halls here: <a href=“http://www.yale.edu/dining/locations/edwards.html[/url]”>http://www.yale.edu/dining/locations/edwards.html</a> (Sorry to make this an ad for Yale–Harvard is similar.)</p>
<p>I listed in post #43 the facilities in my House. Forgot there was also a dark room. </p>
<p>Adams House had a swimming pool, but it got turned into a theater. I don’t really know what other houses had because while I occasionally had lunch with a friend in other houses, I didn’t spend my evening or weekend hours in other houses.</p>
<p>The dining room and the fact that tutors/advisors were located in the houses really were conducive to sticking around your house.</p>