Which colleges have dorms like palaces?

College Search & Selection
21

<p>tokenadult, where’d you stay? Admittedly, Mitchell and Thurston are at the lower end of the totem pole but I’ve slept in Ivory and it’s fantastic.</p>

22

<p>“Surely they jest, unless GWU has built a lot of new dorms since I lived in one for a summer program.”</p>

<p>Have to agree with this - when we visited GWU the dorms were the ONLY thing that didn’t blow us away. Small, cramped… that’s 2 years ago.</p>

23

<p>When I visited Williams, the (upper-class) dorm we saw was recently renovated, huge kitchen and lounge area with appropriate mood lighting, pool & foosball tables, leather couches, etc. Everything was very spacious and very shiny. Kind of what I imagine a frat house to look like, although I have no point of reference.</p>

24

<p>i have a friend at GW (freshman) who was thrown in with three other roommates in a small room. Hardly a palace. And for big bucks too. GW has a good marketing machine though…so I’m not surprised that they’re showing up on these lists.</p>

25

<p>Harvard is on the list? I would say Stoughton and Hollis rooms are the best, but in comparison to some of the others on the list, they’re pretty much average…</p>

26

<p>I thought some of the dorms at Reed were killer…</p>

27

<p>I’m sorry, but I spent the night in Bowles Hall at Berkeley for an admitted students program, and it is one of the reasons I chose not to attend Cal. It does have a cool neo-Gothic exterior, but the interior was more reminiscent of an institution. </p>

<p>As a whole, housing at USC is average, but the Parkside Area offers some of the nicest housing I have seen at any college. I have been a resident at the Parkside International Residential College (PIRC) and the Parkside Arts and Humanities Residential College (PAHRC-which was just built this year), and they are phenomenal. Check out [Sign</a> Up](<a href=“http://www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-dorm23aug23,1,4879775,full.story?ctrack=1&cset=true]Sign”>http://www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-dorm23aug23,1,4879775,full.story?ctrack=1&cset=true) for information on PAHRC. Suites, private bathrooms, plasma TV’s, study lounges, private music practice rooms, a performance space, banquet rooms, and $11,000 Poel Henningson lighting fixtures</p>

<p>Ahh…there’s nothing like PAHRC
[New</a> Residence Built on Fresh Ideas](<a href=“http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/14131.html]New”>http://www.usc.edu/uscnews/stories/14131.html)</p>

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<p>I thought it was nice.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.housing.berkeley.edu/livingatcal/bowles/bowles.mov[/url]”>http://www.housing.berkeley.edu/livingatcal/bowles/bowles.mov&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

29

<p>Here’s a place with great (and brand new) dormitories, but I doubt if anyone on CC would submit an application; U of Texas-Arlington.</p>

30

<p>LOL…funny post Lake Washington. How many in Seattle apply to UT-Arlington? </p>

<p>My comment is this: you can have a superb dorm room, spacious and amenities galore, but if your roomate is a drag, it really doesnt matter. Conversely, if you have an avg dorm but a super roomate, it makes life a lot easier. So I would focus more on the roomate issue if you have a choice and if not, then spend time on that campus and try to get a feel for the kind of people who go there: are they heavy party people? are they nerds? are they frenetic? are they relaxed and get along with everyone? are they cliquey and snobby? What policies does the school have? Do they let you describe yourself and do they make an effort to match you up?<br>
My kid has an above avg to avg dorm. Its an old building but it has enormous history and character with some great exclusive traditions. The roomate was a PERFECT match and has made it so much easier this first semester in college. And that counts more than all the down pillows you can muster. </p>

<p>Everyone has their own ideal of what college will be like. Having dorms that FIT you and your lifestyle is very important so make sure you visit the campuses before you commit to any offer of admission. </p>

<p>Good luck.</p>

31

<p>and one more point…take Princeton Review with a grain of salt. It has outdated information often. At my kid’s school they trashed the dorms and food…all of which turned out to be totally false!</p>

32

<p>LOL Catfishin…</p>

<p>A nitwit (or worse) roomate can make sharing a palace absolutely miserable.</p>

33

<p>Bryn Mawr College</p>

34

<p>I think tiny dorms are a blessing in disguise. They compel you to spend less time in your room wasting time and more time out getting everything your college has to offer.</p>

<p>Penn’s Hill house is a great example of a terrible dorm with happy students</p>

35

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<p>Really? I don’t think a bigger room would compel me to stay in my room any more than a small room (especially since these rooms aren’t smaller by a large margin).</p>

36

<p>Dartmouth has pretty neat ones. But Pomona has the best!</p>

37

<p>My house(s).</p>

38

<p>We’re talking dorms here, so “palace” should not be used in the same sentence. :)</p>

<p>Having visited several colleges, both on and off the list, I would say that the women’s and former women’s colleges on the Northeast have some of the best dorm rooms. Because the colleges were originally built for upper class women who came from large houses themselves, in a time when women were thought to be more delicate and sensitive to their surroundings, the dorms reflected this. Of course, more recent buildings couldn’t be considered substandard by the students, or the college wouldn’t get anyone to live there except by bad lottery.</p>

<p>I’m most familiar with Smith dorms, the top on the list. Many of the rooms on campus are huge, without the double-made-into-a-triple rooms that other campuses have. However, there are also much smaller rooms, and particular houses (dorms) are known for not being as spacious.</p>

<p>As for GWU, which I did not see, I suspect that the same applies. Many of the rooms may be large for dorms rooms, although not all are. Tokenadult, we’re past the dorm years, so I’d bet that all dorms rooms would seem cramped and in need of work to us. :)</p>

<p>None of the dorms rooms at any college can be called luxurious, which is why the “dorms are like palaces” phrase cracks me up.</p>

39

<p>gotta give it to Pepperdine and Middlebury</p>

40

<p>Poster X claims that the new dorms slated for construction at Yale really will be “pleasure palaces.” But I realized that this whole thread is about an unscientific poll, so I have to put up my stock message about why people shouldn’t believe such polls: </p>

<p>One professor of statistics, who is a co-author of a highly regarded AP statistics textbook, has tried to popularize the phrase that “Voluntary response data are worthless” to go along with the phrase “correlation does not imply causation.” Other statistics teachers are gradually picking up this phrase.</p>

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