Rent Control

When Edward Harkness gave Harvard $13,000,000 to build the House system, he hoped to take the College out of the hotel business. Yet in their annual room assignment task the Housemasters, like hotel proprietors, must often struggle to find suitably priced rooms for residents. Even after the Masters have distributed their rent adjustment funds, many students must pay more than they can really afford.

The University's half-hearted attempt to price rooms on their merits has resulted in a bewildering maze of room rents. College officials have felt that the best rooms should command the highest rents, but were they accurately to follow this conviction, only wealthy students would get the good House would also mean that any new, inexpensively built Hoses would mostly contain scholarship students.

The system of varied room rents gives to the Housemasters a tremendous job which they are not equipped to perform. In assigning suites, the Masters are supposed to give poorer members the low rent rooms, and the wealthier students accommodations at higher prices. The rent adjustment funds are designed to provide some flexibility in the assignment process. But Housemasters have found that well-to-do students will argue long and vigorously for the luxurious, but low priced suites. Unless the Masters know the prosperity of every student in the House, they cannot administer the varied room rent system very wisely.

Since the Masters are unable to smooth the inequities of the room rent pattern, the price schedule should be on a simple plane, with room rent, like tuition and board, charged at a single rate. The equalized rent would greatly simplify room distribution, for suite assignment would no longer meet financial barriers. Rooms could be assigned to sophomores by lot; then students who wished to move in their junior and senior years could choose from the rooms vacated graduating seniors.

No grave problems of financial aid should arise from rent equalization. The financial Aid center, which already tries to adjust students' resources to tuition and board charges, would merely include a flat room rent in its formulas. A few students who do not now require financial aid would undoubtedly have to request it under a fixed room rent system. But the simplicity of a single charge for all University expenses should outweigh any extra burden placed on the Financial Aid Office.

The flat room rent would not interfere with the masters' ability to make emergency allowances for students suffering financial crises during the year. they would continue to make these special grants at their discretion from a small fund provided from room rent collections. Naturally, the flat rate would be fixed high enough to fill this fund.

A uniform House residence charge would emphasize the fact that students are paying for more than their rooms when they live in a House. the services that distinguish a House from a hotel the tutors, the libraries, the common rooms, the squash courts-are also the most expensive. A flat residence rate would answer the protests of millionaires who now object to paying "exorbitant rent for just an ordinary room." It would muffle the din of imagined injustices, while providing a substantial solution for the real hardship that varied room rents produce.