<p>A school that does not guarantee housing all four years belongs at the bottom of any dorm ranking.</p>
<p>I’m looking at you, Dartmouth and Cornell.</p>
<p>Actually at Cornell, most students I knew who could choose between off-campus and dorms picked off-campus. Off-campus housing is better, cheaper, and you can pick who you live with.</p>
<p>This situation would certainly be different at a"big-city" school, but Ithaca is a huge college town. The collegetown area off-campus, where many students live, is virtually an extension of the campus, one does not lose the feeling of association with the university by living there. Your fellow students are all around you. You just have different housing.</p>
<p>I learned to cook there, it was a valuable plus.</p>
<p>The dorms are useful freshman year, in promoting social relationships. But once these are in place, people tend not to be so outgoing anymore and actually prefer the company of their friends to the amorphous hordes. This was D1s experience, at a school which DID guarantee housing all four years. </p>
<p>In short, in no way did I feel shortchanged, actually I think the off-campus aspect was a net plus. In that setting, probably not at some other schools though.</p>
<p>The dorms themselves are fine, nothing wrong with them, but then they are still just dorms, not your own apartments or rooms in a house rented with friends.</p>
<p>We guarantee all four years, but something like 70% of people are off-campus senior year. There’s plentiful, affordable housing within a mile radius of campus which makes sticking on campus less desirable. I was actually closer to my lab the two years I lived off-campus than the two I lived on campus. I also don’t think off-campus living being common is a bad thing, so long as the college still has a residential feel because everyone is living close anyway.</p>