All Eli Freshmen Now Assigned to Upperclass House

Yale freshman no longer have any control over selecting the upper-class house in which they will spend their next three years.

Under a new plan announced this fall, a committee of four Eli deans will do the choosing for them. The new system will go into operation next spring, when the Class of 1953 moves into the ten undergraduate colleges.

The aim of the new program is to guarantee a uniform cross-section of the class in each college. Under the old system, which resembles the Harvard house plan, freshmen in groups of up to 12 could apply to any house of their choice. Invariably 60 to 70 percent of past Yale classes have bid for one of three socially elite colleges, Davenport, Calhoon, or Branford.

The result was far from the idealized cross section between scholarship and non-scholarship students, liberal arts and engineering majors, private and public school graduates, which is the goal of the new plan.

The old system saw five or six houses with applications for only 50 per cent of their available rooms. The Dean's program eliminates this vacancy problem, which often involved embarrassing allocation decisions by the house masters, along with building the prestige and usefulness of otherwise outcast colleges.

The Yale Daily News has given the program its blessing with the comment that the plan "will help establish the tradition which the colleges must eventually have." However, the college daily reserves final judgment on the new procedure, which it terms a "wonderful stopgap measure.... If the University does not make sure to use it as a starting point for other changes the colleges might be permanently reduced to the status of glorified dormitories," the paper warns.