Off to the freshman dorm with you! (Student housing poll)

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was looking at the Wikipedia article on my old college, and then the college website itself. FTR, I went to UCSD where each undergraduate chooses a college within the larger university. The colleges exist not only for the purpose of providing an on-campus housing community, but each also has its own academic requirements that must be met to receive a bachelor’s degree. My college was Revelle.

Anyway, with regard to my college, I was surprised and a little dismayed to see that the eight residence halls which were available to all of us when I was there are now designated for first year students only. When I was there, they were open to all undergraduates, and many of us stayed there through the entire four years (or more). In my opinion, this helps to foster camraderie in the college. It also encourages good relations among the different years of the school. On a more hedonistic level, when I think of some of the epic parties that went on (for even we Revelle nerds do need to blow off steam), it makes me sad now to think that everyone living in these places now is a freshman, that is, they’re out of Argo Hall forever in the Spring of their first year, when they’re still wet behind the ears from their last shower at home, so to speak.

I looked around at a couple of other UC websites. UCI is doing the “freshman dorm” thing, too. So it makes me ask: Is this becoming a trend? If you went to college in the 1970s, like I did, what was the situation regarding undergraduate dorms in your day? What is it like if you’re an undergraduate now?

2

I was in Class of '07 and all the way on the other side of the country, but when we had it, there were designated Freshman Dorms, the the better quality dorms going basically to the rest of the students. It was also sorta segregated in 2nd,3rd, and 4th years by a lottery system- so the seniors would have the best numbers then the juniors then the sophomores. So this would lead to the best dorms being filled up with mostly Seniors, and then the next best being mixed with juniors and seniors and so on down the line until some dorms were basically just the frat houses and the poor sophomores who had the worst numbers stuck next to them.

I didn’t mind the system as you could go in with your numbers if you were a group- so there were some soph. and juniors that could have a senior friend and they’d all get a dorm room together simply by using the seniors number. That way there was some mixing but that wasn’t really the norm.

3

My college (Kalamazoo College, class of '08) actually required that your first two years be spent on campus and living in a dorm. We had six dorms and for the first year were assigned randomly; most first year students got stuck in the smallest-roomed and oldest dorm. There weren’t any limitations, it pretty much depended on what your lottery number was by the time you went to register for each semester. Upperclassmen had a lower number/higher priority. The dorms were equally mixed with the different years. However, after I left they decided to designate certain dorms to only house certain years so all of the freshmen were stuck in dorm A, sophomores in dorm B, and so on. I think this was a silly, pointless thing to do and I’m glad I got out before that happened.

4

We had a required first two years on campus, then the majority moved off-campus (usually less than a quarter-mile off, it being an old college and a small town) for the last two years. There were freshman dorms, non-freshman dorms, and one mixed upperclass and freshman dorm. I’d hate a four-years-on rule, mostly because it’s waaaaaay cheaper to live off campus (I’m paying $185 in rent right now). Requiring people to live on campus for four year would significantly raise the effective price of the college.

5

We didn’t have a four-years-on-campus rule, but a lot of seniors did live on my campus. One reason was that there wasn’t really much suitable housing in the immediate campus neighborhood, so living off campus usually meant having to use some sort of motorized transportation to reach school. If you used your own car, obviously, you had to get a parking permit. From what I remember of my friends in that situation, the amount of money to be saved wasn’t all that much.

I suppose all college housing offices give priority of choice based on class standing, and mine was no exception. But there wasn’t that much difference between the halls and rooms. Blake and Argo seemed to be more the party dorms, and they were somewhat more conveniently located directly on or near Revelle Plaza. Because I wanted to stay in the German House, I remained in the less fashionable “Mud Huts”, reputed to have been Marine barracks in the days when Camp Matthews occupied the UCSD site. Still, I had a top floor room so I enjoyed a 12 foot cathedral ceiling. Nevertheless, in none of the student rooms on campus was there any great difference in the appointments or conveniences, or in the number or amount of sinks, showers, toilets, or personal space allocated to each resident.

6

We had the same system. I believe all freshmen lived in double rooms. They were grouped together in “units” of about 20-50 students, and each unit had some older students living in the same dorm and serving as peer counselors. They weren’t RAs in the traditional sense: they did little to no policing but helped out with various academic and social issues.

Many sophomores also lived in doubles, but some lived in suites with 4-5 single rooms and a common room. Juniors had single rooms or nicer suites. Seniors were allowed to live off campus and the vast majority did.

Class of '95.

7

I went to UC Santa Cruz, and living on campus wasn’t required, but almost everyone did it because off-campus housing was so expensive and difficult to find. (It’s funny, because I live in a college town again now, and it’s night and day with finding a place to live…they are doing something really, really wrong in Santa Cruz.) My college had both apartments and dorms, and as the apartments were much more sought-after, they went to the older students. Very few non-freshmen wanted to be in the dorms, when they could live in the apartments.

I lived in the dorms my freshman year, the apartments my sophomore year, did my junior year abroad, and lived off-campus my senior year.

My college was kind of unusual in this regard. Santa Cruz had eight colleges when I went there (it has ten now) and most of them had only dorms. One had only apartments. I don’t think there were any other colleges that had a mix of both, although I could be misremembering.

Class of '00.

8

Graduated 1997; freshman dorm system. Most dorms were co-ed.

There are a lot of arguments on both sides. You meet a greater range of people in a mixed dorm, but there are some practical advantages to Freshman dorms.

  1. For the school
    -freshman need more RA time; the more experienced & proven RAs are normally assigned to freshman dorms, which gets the best help where it is needed most.
    -some control of underage drinking, since no one in the dorm is of age to drink.

  2. For the student
    -since everyone is in intro-level classes, you are likely to have classes with dorm friends; instant study group.
    -It’s just a really good atmosphere to make friends; since no one has any, everyone is in “looking for friends” mode. Most of my college friends, and those I am still in touch with 12 years later, I know from my freshman dorm. There’s an espirit de corps within groups of people going through the same life transition together.
    At my school they had this big thing on “self determination in residence life” that means that the house rules, aside from illegal things like alcohol, were set by the dorm by vote. So we did not have more draconian rules than any other dorm, other than what we chose ourselves.

ETA: living on campus was mandatory freshman year, unless you lived with family. After that it was optional, but very desirable (the off campus housing situation wasn’t very good).

9

We had actual RAs who didn’t do much policing; they’d more likely ask you not to bogart that joint or pass them a beer.

10

Ok, you asked for freshman dorm stories, here you go.

1989, New Concord, Ohio. I moved into Patton Hall on the scenic campus of Muskingum College.

I was lucky enough to get a corner room, which oddly were smaller than the others. The bunk beds were held together at 1 point by duct tape and a drumstick (the musical kind, thankfully). A pane was broken in 1 of the windows, but then again, the windowsill was also crumbling so why worry? I wouldn’t get cold. There was a big steam radiator ready to hiss and sputter all winter long.

Above the door, there was a squawkbox like the ones you would find in public school classrooms. Well, that was there to let you know you had a phone call! A resident hall guy had to sit by a phone bank and announce to you you had a call on line whatever, then you had to go into the hall where 30 guys shared 4 party line phones with the rest of the building. Since these boxes were 2-way, your room was effectively bugged 24 hours a day.

And if you got a visitor who was (gasp) a girl(!), she had to be announced over the PA, then you had to walk downstairs to escort her through the halls. There was an established policy that no member of the opposite sex could wander more than an arm’s length away from a resident. It was never clear to me what the punishment would be for breaking this rule.

Taking a shower was risky because we had that setup where, if you flush the toilet, anybody under the showerhead would be badly scalded. Therefore, we were encouraged to shout “Fire in the Hole!” whenever we flushed.

We weren’t allowed keys to the building, so if you waltzed in at some ungodly hour like 11:30, you had to ring a buzzer to wake up the Jumper, who was a dude with the fun job of waking up and opening the door for you.

I don’t mean to sound like I’m complaining: The other men’s dorms were far worse in terms of livability. I mean, we had doors on our toilet stalls. Thomas Hall’s bathroom was arranged so that you could sit and chat with your neighbor while a guy shaved at the mirror 6 feet in front of you. “Hey Buddy! How’s your shit comin’?”

Now go back and look at line 2. This was 1989. That’s eighty-nine.

All in all, a pretty good year.

11

Same school as Hello Again (go fightin’ Herbils!), roughly the same time period, similar experiences to hers. I’d add that I found living in an upperclass dorm a very different experience; I don’t think any of my hallmates became more than passing acquaintances.

At the university where I currently work, only about a quarter of the students live on campus. The freshmen are all in one dorm (coed by wing); the upperclass students are scattered across campus in various dorms, all single-sex. (It is a very conservative part of the country, and in general, the rules for campus housing are a lot more in loco parentis than I’d be comfortable with if I were a student – for example, students here are not allowed to have overnight guests of the opposite sex.)

12

Fretful Porpentine, is your employer a conservative Christian institution? If so I wouldn’t be greatly surprised that they have conservative standards of behavior. After all, BYU even dictates behavior of off-campus residents, and I believe they have proctors or inspectors to insure compliance.

OTOH in my day things were wide, WIDE open at UCSD, and I think things have gotten a lot stricter with regard to things like pot and alcohol. Not with overnight guests, though.

13

I know people with kids in the UCs, and it is my impression that it is almost impossible to get a dorm room after you are a freshman. My daughter is in U of Maryland, and she is only in a dorm as a senior because she is a (hard-ass ) RA. State schools don’t seem to be putting up the money to be building dorms for everyone. My other daughter went to Chicago, and stayed in a dorm all four years.

When we were in college my wife went to a school with a freshman dorm, but MIT didn’t have them. People moving dorms were in the back of the list for room assignments each year, and didn’t move often. My dorm had freshman areas at the end of the halls, with a bunch of sophomores and a few unlucky juniors. It worked out really well, since the sophs taught the freshmen all the tricks they learned.

14

When I went to college, there was a Freshman dorm. Students were not required to leave, but it was not considered prime dorm space, so upper classmen usually didn’t stay. I moved back there my junior year because the floor was going co-ed, and my roommate and I were the only upper classmen there.

Where I work, there are three Freshman dorms, and a fourth one that is a combination. Again, they are the least desirable dorms on campus (not counting the combination) and students are happy to move elsewhere.

15

No, no religious affiliation at all. It’s a public university, historically a woman’s college but now coed.

16

Mississippi University for Women?

17

When your college kids are all about sticking it to the man and corporations and whathaveyou, and your townies want the city to look exactly like it always has forevermore, it’s very easy to pass zoning laws that would make it very hard for big apartment complexes to get built. Also, aren’t you in Michigan? Last I checked, Ann Arbor wasn’t smack dab on an incredible beach where it’s never hot and never cold. So scratch what I said earlier. What’s wrong with Santa Cruz is people would actually live there voluntarily.

I think almost every college has had apartments built in the last ten years, and yeah, they’re usually reserved for upperclassmen.

18

Yup. (Not too hard to figure that one out, I guess – I should probably be more circumspect, except I figure that anyone really determined to work out my RL identity has more than enough information already.)

19

I went to college in the early 90s. Most of the dorms were freshman only. There were a couple of dorm halls with upper classmen but it was looked at as sort of an oddity. Basically after freshman year you had a couple of options:

Pledged a fraternity/sorority and lived in the house with 35 guys or girls (not both)

Moved offcampus and lived offcampus in a ratty townhouse that had a dank stone-lined cellar with a single naked lightbulb suspended over a beer pong table made from a sheet of plywood or a door or whaterver.

If you and your 3 housemates got lucky in the housing lottery, you might get an on-campus 3 BR suite appartment (also a sweet appartment).

Living in the actual dorms beyond freshman year was sort of looked at as weird. The implication was you couldn’t get into a fraternity and couldn’t find a housing situation to live in.

20

Florida State University, late 80s-early 90s.

Most students did not live on campus. They even had dorms that were not air conditioned in the extreme heat of Tallahassee, Florida.

There were two private dorms operated off campus. That’s were I stayed my first year. My freshman roommate became a casual friend.

After that, I lived in apartments and rented houses. I liked this. Close enough to campus to get the campus life, but far enough away to know I could get some sleep.