Fraternity thoughts: 1 of my kids lived in the fraternity all four years. it was incredibly cheap! (2015-19) and as an officer he got a reduction of half off! but boy, did he get annoyed with it at the end of college! S20 did not live in; good thing. noisy!
Our D23 will live in her sorority. it’s cheaper than living in the dorm or in an apartment her sophomore year. good girl! and its nothing crazy like the boys’ houses are.
D23 UPDATE:
D23 is having a GOOD year!! yay!!! her senior year was the worst. it was awful. girl drama; small school > depression. She went to our midwest state school on a great engineering scholarship, and is coming out of the darkness. i am so so so thankful.
So part of her scholarship includes summer internships with an (international) company. She got to chose where . . . some of her co-horts are heading to hawaii, alaska, seattle, NYC, charlotte, etc. She chose . . . . Denver. . . . that’s where her older sister lives now! My girly-girl dancer will be a field engineer; wearing her hard hat, vests, and steel-toed boots. I honestly dont know if this is her thing but she will learn a ton and figure things out.
Good luck to all those whose kids are dealing with the stress of sophomore housing issues! It can be very stressful.
We expected this to be a train wreck for our kid but (not for the first time) he seemed to have figured out an angle. His college kind of lulls you in the first year with prime on-campus first year only dorms, half of which are singles, so you can usually get a single if you want one. Then sophomore year you’re bottom of the lottery for all the other housing and end up off campus in forced doubles. Which he really didn’t want. Instead, he applied for special interest housing months before the housing lottery. Most of the groups are identity-based groups, but there’s a few that are activity-based including one for music. Only 5 slots for rising Sophomores and an interview process but somehow he snagged a slot and as a result had already secured a single room assignment in a dorm usually only accessible to seniors by lottery preference. And he can now stay in that group as long as he wants so he’s basically guaranteed a single all four years. Meanwhile, the college FB parent group and student reddit group is full of kids desperately trying to pair up for the lottery.
Our S will be sharing a room off campus, and he’s thrilled
The forced triple room freshman year was tolerable, but also did the trick of making a double room seem like a palace (and they will have a real kitchen, an actual living room, and he only has to share a bathroom with one other guy…)
Student housing market, probably pretty crazy most places!
All three of our kids colleges guaranteed 4 year housing, including the current one. For one of them, it’s like you describe where it got better every year as your class status increased (and all housing was truly on campus). For another, it was kind of in-between. Generally housing got better as you got older, but they did have prime on campus locations for the first year dorms, so you got better rooms sophomore year but further away.
At Columbia the way they do it is all the original core-campus dorms are mostly first year only – with one exception that is mostly sophomores (because high lotteries don’t pick it). The vast majority of the rest of their housing is technically off campus in the nearby neighborhood of Morningside Heights (Columbia is the largest private land owner in NYC, and NYU is close behind them, and neither pay property taxes – a source of contention in their communities). There’s a couple other dorms mostly for seniors that are in the newer adjacent parts of campus. First years are all assigned by the college. Students fill out a survey. They can’t specifically select whether they prefer singles or doubles, but the answers to their questions can be leading in identifying that preference. After first year, it’s one big pool for all three other years with seniors having higher lottery numbers than juniors, etc. And they encourage people to group up in even numbered pairs – 2, 4, 6, 8, etc. – because many of the housing options are mini-suites. So then the game of grouping up with high lottery people begins and the groups total lottery number determines the order in which they can select. All this leads to a fair amount of trauma as loose friend groups with perhaps odd numbers end up freezing out people who didn’t make the even numbered cut. And the fact that half of the first year dorms are singles means a lot of people head into the sophomore process without pre-set logical roommates.
I don’t think Columbia has enough housing for everyone so their trick is that the four year guarantee is voided if you ever opt to get your own non-affiliated private housing at any point. In other words, if your sophomore housing isn’t to your liking and you want to get an apartment that year and try your luck Junior or Senior year when you should have a higher lottery number, that doesn’t work because once you leave the system you lose your guarantee and are at the bottom of the lottery priority. Some people leave anyway, particularly if they have parents willing to fund them (including broker fees) and sign the credit guarantees for private housing in NYC (no thank you).
I was just reading an article a couple days ago about what a huge issue student housing is and how private companies have of course filled the void, but at a cost. Colleges have expanded enrollments without expanding housing nearly as much. As a result it’s created a supply/demand imbalance that big companies are filling with large private housing projects adjacent to campuses. In any places it used to be that finding old apartment buildings was cheaper than on campus housing but now even in relatively rural and suburban campuses those little old complexes have been bought up, demoed and turned into larger, high density housing that costs even more than than on campus housing because students have no choice. Sometimes these students are paying $1,500/month for windowless tiny rooms in these private complexes.
The article also noted the conflicts of interest. For example, Clemson’s President has led the university in dramatically expanding enrollment without expanding much housing and now his family is the main developer of large private for profit housing complexes near the campus.
We visited 3 schools last weekend. 2 made the list for transfer app submission. So the list is down to 4. We’ll see what happens! S25 took the March digital SAT and score went down 100points . He has been sick so much this year and missed a lot of school- it’s affected his grades. Being a parent is hard!
You should do a write up in the move up or down school thread. It would be interesting to hear from a transfer point of view. It seems like most are either early high schoolers or those that have just been admitted.
His October one was decent. And he’s doing the ACT in a few weeks. Going to have his sister who got a perfect ACT do some prep with him on strategies.
But yes, mostly hearing bad things. His friend scored almost 200 points lower.
I did actually. St. Olaf, Carleton and Macalester…. If anyone on here has a student at any of those. Carleton had a similar vibe to Hamilton for her. So she isn’t applying. She liked the other two, although they are completely different.
This feels so late to be deciding on whether to apply. I’m sure it’s not, my head is just still used to the timelines for first-year students.
Although my son is transferring too, he’s headed to a large university where transfer students sometimes don’t get housing. He applied in January and was excited to get his housing last week, so a different experience. It sounds like your daughter won’t have to worry about that at the schools she’s interested in.
Each kid travels such a different road. Good luck to your daughter figuring out the right place for her—and to your ‘25 son having to follow in her footsteps (perfect ACT )
Her last apps are due Sunday and she always waits until the last minute for everything .
My son is not the college entrance test taker his sister was. They have different strengths, but weirdly, all their testing when they were tested for gifted when we moved here in 4th and 7th grades were almost identical. He is hoping for a 30 ACT. He got a 28 when he took it the first time. I hadn’t realized when we got tickets to a Travis Scott concert that it was the night before the ACT. We got home at 1:30am. So, I think a 30 is a good goal.
He is applying to the service academies who superscore and say to take it as many times as possible.
Thanks for the well wishes.
She went to our midwest state school on a great engineering scholarship, and is coming out of the darkness. i am so so so thankful.
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your post, but I went with positivity!