Keep Student Choice In Housing Lottery

Earlier this year, the effort to randomize the housing lottery was gaining steam. Several administrators and House masters revived their argument for enhancing diversity in residential life at Harvard. We opposed randomization because of our belief in the value of student choice.

Last week, the committees on House and College Life tried to work out a compromise, approving two measures that the committee says will increase diversity within the houses while preserving student choice.

By the first, the committee voted to reduce the maximum student blocking group size from 20 to 16. We support this new compromise to the extent that it heads off the masters' continuing push for randomization. But we question whether it will truly increase house diversity.

House masters originally supported a plan that would have reduced maximum group size to eight, in an effort to make house composition more random. The change would promote diversity by preventing 18 football players, 18 computer hackers, or 18 pre-meds from landing in a single house and upsetting house balance.

Students wanted to maintain full choice in deciding their residential arrangements, and consequently they supported keeping the current 20-person limit. The 16-person limit would seem a reasonable middle road between what the students want and what the masters want.

However, in practical terms, this new change will have little effect on student choice, or diversity in the houses. According to one committee member, in the past five years only one student blocking group exceeded the new limit.

We must question then whether the new limit will really slow the push by randomization supporters, or is this only an initial step in the gradual erosion of student choice?

With this concern in mind, we oppose the second proposal by which the committee calls for allowing students to list six choices, as opposed to the current four.

"About eighty-three percent of students get one of their choices with the system of four," said committee member Justin C. Label '97. "With six, we can just about guarantee it. This plan would broaden choices and broaden diversity."

Broaden choices? That's an interesting spin. By this logic, if students were forced to list their top 12 houses, we could guarantee they got one of their choices.

Forcing students to add two more choices to their top four, would necessarily decrease the probability of a student getting one of his or her top choices.

Some students may be sent to houses they didn't really want to live in but were compelled to put down to meet the requirement.

Label said this disadvantage is outweighed by the increased choice the proposal offers.

"For the most part, I don't think students have only four houses that they would want to live in," Label said. "Most students have just a handful of houses that they would not want to live in."

We think most students would disagree.

At bottom, we respect the masters concerns for diversity. Limiting blocking sizes seemed like a prudent compromise to increase diversity. In recent weeks, we endorsed accepting the masters' suggested limit of eight, so long as students retain their present level of choice.

But expanding non-ordered choice to six houses would dramatically reduce the amount of student choice in the housing lottery process. We ask that the administration and the Committees on College and House Life consider students' wishes before pushing ahead with a radical "solution" that few undergraduates really want.