Be It Ever So Humble, There's No Place...

When David Stollman set off for his freshman year, the never expected his Ivy League school to assign him to a modern suite on the 11th floor of a 24-floor high-rise, an apartment with a large living room, a kitchen, a bathroom and two bedrooms for there people.

While a generation ago most Ivy Leaguers lived in buildings of the traditional architecture that marks much of Stollman's school, the University of Pennsylvania, today there is a wide range of rooming arrangements and housing systems throughout the ancient eight.

Harvard students encounter an uncomplicated housing system. More than 90 percent of students lives on campus, with sophomores, juniors and seniors staying in the mainly neo-Georgian houses for three years with all meals provided for them, whether they like them or not.

But other schools offer students a more mobile college experience, with options ranging from apartment style living with no meal plan to the type of patriarchal system that found its way to Harvard and Yale via Oxford.

Penn, for instance, offers a wide range of rooming options for students, including living in its Quad, whose gothic architecture is popular with students for providing the flavor of tradition they say the high rises lack.

The housing options offered by the ancient eight run the gamut from a Columbia-owned apartment near Harlem to the medieval fortress like grey stone dormitories at Princeton.

The lottery systems that as sign the rooms to the students are likewise vastly different. Yale's system is relatively simple, while Columbia students say that they have spent years unsuccessfully trying to understand their school's baffling system.

One of the greatest differences between the housing systems of the Ivy League is the degree of control the student have over where they will live. In some, students can ride the system and hop from one type of room to another each semester, while their colleagues at other school, like Harvard, are required to live in one dorm for three or even four of their college year.

Before they even arrive for their fall term of their freshman year, Yalies are randomly assigned to one of 12 residential colleges. The first year, they generally live in an all freshman yard with classmates in their college, then move to the college itself.

Although it is possible to switch colleges between years, very few students choose to take this option housing officers say. Freshman Jamison Williams, a member of the housing committee at Yale's Ezra Stiles College, says that this year only eight students of the college's 400 had transferred out of Stiles, which students describe as one of Yale's least-likes colleges.

Student at all other Ivy League schools, with the exception of Harvard, have more freedom to move around to different dorms on campus then do their counterparts at Yale, and experience different type of room arrangements and meal plans.

At Dartmouth students from all four years live together in "clusters," groups of two or three dorm buildings that contain 75 to 100 students each, seeming to from the equivalent of a House within the College.

But students and administrators say that after freshman year students are free to switch clusters, and often, if they receive low lottery numbers or if their cluster is particularly popular, they cannot get a room in the same cluster and have to move.

Because of the four-quarter "Dartmouth Plan," which requires students to take fall. winter or if spring term off during their sophomore and junior years, there is a high student turnover rate that leads students to change roommate frequently.

"The housing system must allow for this," says Murray Burk director of student housing at Dartmouth. He says that it was not uncommon for student to live in as many as six different rooms during their four years at the school.

At Princeton, juniors and seniors compete for rooms in the upperclass lottery, and are free to live wherever they can. Some who do not want a meal plan choose to live in Spellman, which offers apartment-style living with kitchens in the suites. But a great majority of the upperclassmen live in dormitories without kitchens.

At Penn, Columbia and Cornell students can choose among almost all rooms on campus, and they compete for them through lottery systems, all of them complicated.

Harvard is far from being the only school where students complain about the housing lottery. In fact, students at almost all Ivy schools launch criticism against the way their school determines who will live where.

At Columbia, according to freshman Mario E. Hurtado, nobody knows what goes on in the lottery, but that students plot, scheme and second-guess to no end.

Despite the cut-throat aura of Penn's "Grand Arena," or general lottery, most people manage to find a satisfactory place to live, students say. "You can just about always get a room in a high-rise, which is actually pretty nice," says freshman Will Fox.

The general rule among the ancient eight is that seniors are awarded an advantage over other students in the lottery, and it is often said that students endure misconveniences in early year, waiting for payday when they are upperclassmen. Cornell is the sole exception to this rule, where seniors are given no advantage over underclassmen in the lottery system.

In fact, Cornell is the exception to almost every Ivy League housing rule, because only 36 percent of the 12,600 undergraduates live in university housing. Penn is the school where the second smallest percentage of students live in school housing; there, 75 percent choose to live on campus.

The relatively small number of students living on campus at Penn and Cornell can be traced to the flourishing Greek systems at each school. Cornell's 50 fraternities and 16 sororities have memberships that account for 37 percent of the men and 29 percent of the women at the school, according to the Barron's Guide to College.

In addition off-campus housing in Ithaca and the surrounding areas is plentiful and relatively inexpensive. "By the time they're juniors, most people want to live off-campus," says Gerry Fenech, a Cornell senior.

Fenech has lived off-campus for two years, and says that the main disadvantage to eschewing university housing is the distance between his room and classes. "A lot of people, like me, live up to, up 15 or 20 minutes from the center of campus. It's long walk," he says.

When students aren't complaining about the lottery system, a common theme is the disrepair of the rooms.

"I think the rooms get painted regularly, and it seems like all needed repairs get done," says Brown freshman Anne Boyd. But "the hallways are a mess, thought, and there was a flood in a dorm a while ago." she says.

Students voice complaints, but they sometimes find reasons to choose to live in dilapidated domiciles. "A lot of freshmen and upperclassmen put up with low-life rooms and really bad bathrooms in the Quad because it's really partying place to," says Fox about a University of Pennsylvania dorm.

Several schools including Princeton and Dartmouth, are extensively repairing some of their dorms.

The ongoing debate at Dartmouth over whether or not to make residential clusters more cohesive exemplifies a split between different Ivy League housing systems.

At Harvard and Yale, and to a lesser degree, at Princeton, exist the only patriarchal systems. These systems provide meals for the overwhelming majority of students and ensure that most of them live with, and to some extent work and play with a certain group of peers for most of their college career.

The question at Dartmouth is how much the school ought to try to gain the advantages of the systems at Princeton and Yale. "The question [at Dartmouth]is whether it is better to encourage moving or if continuity is desirable," says Burk, Dartmouth director of student housing. "Right now we're trying to accommodate both," he says.

Burk says that both the residence halls have characters of their own, and that there is a popular intramural program operating out of the houses. He adds, however, that the turnover rate is perhaps too high in the dorms, with students entering and leaving at the end of every quarter.

It is possible that changes may be implemented in the future that would encourage students to remain in their dormitory clusters, he says. "We are all aware of the house systems, but we are not thinking of them in terms of models for out system," he adds.

Students at Columbia, like students at Penn, said that the type of room they lived in was more important to them than the dorm. "We go more by what type of room we can get than which house we can get," says Columbia freshman Julie E. Schwartz.

At other Ivies without house systems, fraternities can act as substitutes for many students, giving them meals and a set group of peer. Penn, Cornell, Dartmouth and Brown all have active Greek systems.

At Brown about 600 students lives in the Wriston Quad, home of the university-built buildings that house the school's seven fraternities and two sororities. Also in the Quad are "social dorms" which are fraternities specific to Brown, often called "mellow fraternities."

Yale's 12 residential colleges have their own reputations and legends and fosters a great deal of sprit and rivalry.

"There's a great deal of college spirit," says Williams of Yale's residential colleges, "and many activities take place within each college, such as intramural athletics, choruses and parties."

The price-tag of dormitory living is fairly constant throughout the Ivies, tending to cost students an average of $2200 per school year, with some schools charging extra for rooms that have been newly renovated or have kitchens.

Columbia offers the widest range of room costs. The cheapest room, going for $1980 per year, is a single which is a spokesman at the housing office, who did not know the exact dimensions, describes as "way, way small."

But students who manage to get into a highly coveted suit with kitchen and living room in East Campus, a new dorm, will have to pay a little over $36000 for the room next school year, the spokesman says.

Penn and Cornell have a similar system, using a detailed prices scale of charge students for their rooms. Prices vary depending on which dorm they are in, the size of the rooms, numbers of roommates and added features such as kitchens and bathrooms within suites administrators say.

Student living in the Quad at Penn, which 1000 undergrads call home, are charged differing rates according to whether their room has been renovated. Penny Fussell, a spokesman at the housing office says that improvements would be completed within two years, but until then, unrenovated rooms would be priced as much a $6000 per year less than their updated counterparts.

Yale, Harvard and Princeton all have essentially one uniform room rate, mainly because the options for students are much fewer. Yale leads the group, charging $2550 for next year, followed by Harvard at $2065 and Princeton at $1971.