Anonymous wrote:I've heard that Dartmouth is building new undergraduate housing, but yeah, they're mostly awful. Renovations sound great but on a compact campus they often mean that you'll spend multiple years in old nasty housing being woken up at 6:00 am by noisy construction in the dorms adjacent to yours...which will be open the year after you graduate.
My memories of Yale are totally defined by the shabby, dark and irregular quality of the housing. They've renovated a lot but it's still not great, especially because everyone pays the same amount but the luck of the housing lottery or willingness to submit fake doctor notes can make the difference between a stunning suite or a dumpy rathole.
Although residential colleges and dorm rooms were supposedly selected mostly randomly and only to balance things by geography, gender and interests, that was not the case. Inevitably the most well-off or connected students ended up in the most spacious, historically special or appealing 1st year suites. I understand that Harvard did things quite similarly. Not sure if others are more evolved.
My kid is in a beautiful new dorm at Cornell. There were a few new dorms built a couple of years ago, and one or two large dorms that are closed this year for renovation (which has caused a bit of a housing shortage), but should be really nice beginning next fall.