In the lengthy thread on dorm assignments many on this board advocated for a lottery system. John Boyer must be a reader of CC. The cogency of the arguments made on this forum had their due effect!
The mandatng of a second year in dorm is surprising - to me at least. Generations have seen it as a rite of passage to make the move in second year into an apartment so as to begin to live at least a simulacrum of an adult life. But that was partly because it was the done thing. Some must have felt peer pressure to do it, and those that remained behind in second year (I was one) felt accordingly a loss of the communal esprit that characterized first year and a sense that they were regressing. If everyone must remain in dorm a second year that stigma is taken off. The phenomenon of second-year blues is also ameliorated when you are not in that year also on your own with just two or three friends, friends who may be less easy to live with than it seemed at the time. The communal life is jollier and less perilous. Third year is soon enough to become an adult.
Logistics may come in to it as well. It was hard enough 50 years ago to find an HP apartment (I never succeeded but was happy enough in Woodlawn). It can’t be any easier today, when the seekers are so much more numerous. Taking the second year’s off the market will ease the situation.
@Cue7 dependably sees only emulation of H and Y in this, with C doomed always to fail by those lights. Sigh.