House Selection Plan

The Administration's new House assignment plan attacks serious weaknesses in the previous system that very much needed correction. But the new plan has weaknesses of its own, though only a year's experience will indicate whether they are minor or major ones. At present, the plan's chief problem is that no one, least of all the freshmen who have the largest stake in it, understands how it will operate.

Both advocates and opponents of the new system agree that the old method of assigning freshmen hurt certain Houses severely. Freshmen indicated their first, second, and third choices on their House applications, and each Master chose a percentage of those who had ranked his House first. But freshmen regarded a low number of choices for a House as de facto evidence that there was something wrong with it. A vicious circle was created; a House would receive few applications one year for no other reason except that it had received few the year before. Masters of undersubscribed Houses had to fill their quotas from the lists of freshmen who had requested other Houses, the notorious practice of "raiding."

By eliminating the explicit one-two-three preferences and by not publicizing the names of the most requested Houses, the new system will prevent the selection process from deteriorating into a popularity contest. Eventually, deprived of the statistical props which made myth seem like reality, the stereotypes of some Houses as "bad" and others as good will fade.

But the new system rests on a pair of assumptions which ought to be investigated. The old plan provided no way of telling which students had made their first choices for strong reasons and which for weak reasons--one first choice was like any other. The first assumption of the new plan is that only freshmen with strong reasons (Dean Monro calls them "substantial") for preferring a particular House will be sufficiently motivated to express his reasons in a letter to the Committee on Assignments.

The difficulty with asking freshmen to write letters is that no one knows how many letters the Committee will get. If the number is small, the Committee will be able to comply with most of the requests. But if the Committee is flooded with letters of preference, it will become impossible to assign freshmen according to their wishes and still preserve a roughly equal distribution in the Houses between private and public school graduates, academic and athletic stars, and other categories. The Administration will be put in the difficult position of having to weed out the iflmsier reasons for requesting a House, and distinguish "substantial" and "unsubstantial" motives.

And there is no guarantee that those who write letters will automatically have substantial reasons, because there has been no attempt to give freshmen guidelines in determining how worthy their reasons are. Which student has a substantial reason--the freshman with upperclass friends in Quincy House or only the handicapped freshman who needs Quincy's elevators? A freshman with a half-dozen reasons for requesting one House may, think they are not good enough for the Committee, while another may write a letter simply because he likes the fried chicken served in the House dining hall.

And those administering the new assignment system do not seem in agreement over how many letters the mechanism needs to function effectively. Dean Monro has encouraged letters of preference, saying the "system depends strongly on them," while Bruce Chalmers, Master of Winthrop House, has said, "The system will work well if the number of letters is small." The upshot is that the Committee will key its definition of "substantial" on the number of letters its receives, but the freshmen will remain in the dark until after they have already made the decision whether or not to write.

The second assumption is that the Houses are so much alike that no one will suffer from living in one and not another. This is a reasonable idea, since any House is large and diverse enough to contain something for everyone's tastes. Chalmers believes that any student can be content in any House if he lives in it for a few months, even a House he might not have considered if he were forced to rank his first three choices. But it is also true that there are significant differences among the Houses, even if the differences are only reflections of different Masters and House staffs. Athletic teams, dramatic and musical facilities, art societies, food, rooms, even architecture all vary from House to House.

Therefore, it is possible that though the majority of freshman assigned to a House will be happy there, a few will want strongly to leave even after a year's trial. Perhaps the solution would be to make the system more flexible by allowing a single opportunity for dissatisfied students to switch Houses, perhaps at the end of their sophomore year. If the Houses are indeed capable of satisfying most of their residents, then there will be very few transfers. Rather than the old system's rigid choices based on hearsay, the new system would then provide a flexible safety valve based on experience.

The final criterion of success for the new system will be how well it deals with the problem of student choice. Even a Master's choice of freshmen for his House depends on the freshmen's own preferences; if the Master does not know which freshmen want to be in his House, how can he request the ones he thinks the House should have?

But the letter system of expressing choice does not insure against misallocation of students. And it will probably operate with particularly low efficiency this year, because the freshmen have been left too much on their own in deciding whether or not they should state a preference. Some who have strong feelings may not write, and some with only faint reasons may send letters. But eventually, experience will probably stabilize the number of letters around the number of freshmen with intense feelings. Perhaps the biggest danger of the new system is that the Committee's actions may degenerate into a mere bureaucratic ritual if it is not connected with the Masters' self-interest. The Committee must not forget that House assignments will always be very important to freshmen, and that the process will require a lot of administrative effort to assure the most satisfaction to the greatest number of students.