Many students feel that the room draw process is as arbitrary as drawing names from a hat.

In the past, students applied for apartments in groups of four, entering a weighted lotto in with each student was assigned a point value based on his or her number of credits.  This system divided students by semester as well as year, making it nearly impossible to get an apartment if you were a semester behind (or even one class short of completing a semester) without having another member of your apartment balance you out by being a semester ahead.

Under the upcoming system, which the administration plans to announce soon, there will be no more arcane points totals and unforgiving margins of error.  Students will simply be sophomores, juniors, or seniors, aligning the system with that used by the registrar’s office and making it rather more generous in the process.  This system will allow students who are behind academically, even to the point where they will be December graduates the year after their proper graduation date to be counted as members of their entering class for the apartment lotto, benefiting students who took a semester off or otherwise ended up behind in credits.

The committee also considered a scheme in which each member of a group would be assigned an individual lotto number and the group could use the highest of them in consideration for an apartment but it was poorly received by the Deans and abandoned.

The new College Park apartments will be integrated with the revised lotto system.

Although the administration did not disclose many details of the program, Huang commented that, “If students prefer to rent directly from College Park, they may do so provided they sign up to live off-campus next year,” suggesting that students renting from CMC will be subject to the College’s rules, while those renting directly from College Park are on their own. This year, Dean of Students has created a Resident Assistant position at College Park, which serves as a further indication that CMCers living at College Park and renting from CMC will indeed governed by the Basic Rule of Conduct.

Until more details are announced, several questions remain about the impact of this plan. The price of a CMC College Park apartment compared to a dorm room or the Senior Apartments (or even to privately-managed apartments) is still unknown, and students have expressed concern, despite its small scale, about the impact of the new housing on campus life.

Expect updates (or campus-wide emails) on the matter as the story develops and more details are made available.

The Peeker

It’s 1:30 AM. She’s just checking in to see what you’re up to. Want to go to In-n-Out? No? Ok…. Breakfast at ten? … Oh! Hey again. Just seeing who is on the toilet. I’ll be in my room.

The DJ

Has surround sound. Loves to throw DPs. Told you last year your Kings of Leon was “emo shit” until she heard it on MTV this week. Thinks it is okay to crank that Soulja Boy at 2am on Wednesday. Oh, and she actually believes she discovered Vampire Weekend.

The Wildcard

Tuesday night you went to the reading room with him. Mild mannered. Might get straight A’s. But last Saturday night you found him in the Ath courtyard holding two Scrippsies hostage with a megaphone, no underwear, and a takeout container full of vomit/churros.

The Miracle Student

Is always down for Pub. No regular sleep schedule that you can discern. You’ve never had a class with him and you’re pretty sure he doesn’t even own a copy of Microsoft Word.

The Moocher

He’ll hit you back, can you just pick up a thirty rack? He is going to the ATM tomorrow anyways. Also, you are worried he might be using your electric shaver…and not on his face.

The Relationship Kid

Maybe she has been dating “The One” since 11th grade. Maybe she has a new “one” every week. You don’t even bother sleeping on a friend’s couch anymore. Your double is pretty much a triple. Basically, the rule is “as long as you don’t wake me up…”

The Stranger

No one is really sure how she ended up in the suite. Maybe she had a good room-draw number. Or maybe, she was your friend’s freshman roommate and they never had that awkward conversation. When you tell your friends, “I’m going to dinner with my suite-mates, Sarah, Emily, and Anne,” they respond, “Wait, who is Anne?”

The Diva

He moisturizes. You can’t pronounce the name of his shampoo. You couldn’t even guess the thread count on his towel, let alone his bathrobe. Gets more face-time with the mirror than The Wildcard gets with the toilet.

Lesser Archetypes: The Naked Kid, The Absentee, The Slob, The Neatfreak, The Host, The Rich One, The Cheapskate, The Fighter, The Easy One, The Prude, The Planner, The Puker, The Driver, The Hermit, The Whiner, The Instigator.

Feel free to post your own.

Here are a few ideas that I have been kicking around that might make Claremont McKenna a lot more efficient and fully utilize the creativity of our students.

One such idea would be to use auction markets and web 2.0 tech to allocate housing, classes, and even library books. More precisely, what if we used the opportunity of the loss of Ethan Andyshak, CMC’s housing czar, to design a software system that allocated housing? What would such a system look like?

The current system has more in common with a Soviet-style, planned economy than with a school whose motto is civilization prospers with commerce. There is no commerce, just the credit-based rationing of time slots. But why not level the playing field and let preference, not AP-credits dictate housing?  Why not auction off some or all dorm rooms ahead of time, offering students the opporunity to buy the rooms they want, and enjoy the financial benefit? At George Washington University, they did just that and raised thousands for a scholarship fund. CMC could use this to cover the shortfall in financial aid (aid, as I explained in my last post, that will be cut $600,000).

But if you all are repulsed at the idea of money being used, then we could adopt a non-monetary auction.

Wharton, or as I like to call it, the CMC of the East, employs such program for class selection. (Here’s a brief description. And here’s the demo of how the software operates.)

Graduate students at Wharton choose their elective classes using an auction system.  Each student is given 5,000 points at the beginning of their career at Wharton which they then use to begin bidding on electives. The most popular classes and professors therefore command the most points.  Once a student has “won” a place in a class, they can then auction that place in the class off to other students as a way to get more points for other classes.  In essence, getting the classes you want to take at Wharton requires business acumen right from the start.

That sounds all well and good, but how does it live out in the everyday? Here’s how an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in an article, jokingly called, “Class Warfare,” describes the process.

Wharton auctions spots to its M.B.A. students, allowing them to bid for their classes. They don’t use real money; instead, students are each given 5,000 points when they enroll and 1,000 more for every credit they earn. An average course might sell for a few hundred points while the most sought-after ones can top 10,000….
But Wharton takes it one step further, allowing students to sell their courses (for points) to other students. It’s all done through a Web site. Buyers and sellers are anonymous, so buddies can’t make deals. Wharton also uses a second-price auction in which the highest bidder wins, but he or she pays the amount of the second-highest bid. Economists like the second-price auction because they think it encourages more honest bidding.
In other words, Wharton has what may be the most sophisticated, and most confusing, course-registration system ever devised.
And, arguably, the fairest. “It’s capitalism gone nuts, but it’s also absolute socialism because everyone is born with the same number of points,” says Justin Wolfers, an assistant professor of business and public policy.

This hybrid model serves as a perfect template for CMC’s housing process. Dean Fid Castro, the new housing dean, could issue the same number of points to all students, and additional points could be issued for seniority, credits, or even GPA. Like the current system, this system would probably reward older students, but the room assignment process for each year would be very different than the status quo. In the auction, some students would buy up sure bets and hold onto them early on. Others would buy dorm rooms only to sell them later when the demand for those dorms picks up as the days near to the closing of the auction, taking the points for use in future years. And there could be massive rewards for saving points. Students who save could conceivably give or trade their points to other students or wait until their senior year when the odds that they will get their preferred room would be much higher.

But the real fascinating thing would be watching how the market actually plays out. Who wins and who loses? What’s the best play to get the room you want? At least in this system, there would be some strategy and fairness in the housing process, and both could be closely measured by the aspiring finance or economics majors. Moreover, an auction would be able to send signals to CMC’s administration about which dorms are valued and by how much. Future dorms could incorporate features that CMC students like. Thus, this process would help current students, the administration, and even future students.

CMC could be the first school to experiment with auctioning in the Claremont Consortium, but in time, it could be expanded out. Such a system would discourage the students who kiss up to get into classes and give the rest of us a chance at getting the courses we want.

We already know civilization prospers with commerce; we might just prosper with auctions.

On the first day of this semester, I went to Ethan Andyshak, the Director of Residential Life, and requested to be moved to a single. He informed me that for a variety of reasons some students were not going to be returning this semester and that there was a chance he’d be able to fill my request. He’d said he would get back to me with an answer in no longer than one week.

It has been a little over two months. I have yet to receive a response. I have had my countless emails outright ignored. I have had five pointless meetings. I have talked with Fid Castro, Ethan Andyshak’s direct superior. And I have yet to receive one freaking definitive word. Not a yes, not a no. I still have stuff piled in my car in preparation for a potential move that I have been told over and over again could occur any day now.

This is what I have been able to cobble together about the housing situation as I sifted through the maze of double speak that has been spewed my way. First, there still are open singles. Multiple singles. However, as much as it pains me to say this, I can kind of understand why I have not been put into one of these open rooms. I have been told they are keeping them open in order to create flexibility during the RA change over. This does make sense to me. They have strung me along by claiming I may still receive one of these rooms after spring break. I have a sneaking suspicion that this article might be the nail in my coffin that prevents this from happening.

The real reason I am angry goes as follows. At the beginning of the year there were students living in singles requesting to live in doubles anywhere. While I am left to wonder why these people were put in singles to begin with, I’ll ignore that question for the time being. It is important to keep in mind that this information has come straight from Mr. Andyshak himself. The truth could be even more ridiculous than what he has happened to let slip during our numerous conversations.

These were students who wanted to move to doubles, so switching rooms would have been a net benefit for both sides. However, because of the bureaucracy of the system I was not put into contact with any of the several people requesting to move into a double until last week. That would be 2 full months after I first made my request. Unsurprisingly, at this point in the year they were so settled into their rooms that they no longer wanted to move.

I want to make clear that I don’t want this article to be seen as a personal attack. For all I know Ethan Andyshak is merely following protocol. If this is the case, it’s not with him that I have a problem. It’s rather with the painfully inefficient bureaucracy of the system. I fully understand that not all requests can be honored. But I don’t feel like it is asking too much to say that requests should be dealt with in a timely and efficient manner. A yes when willing parties exist, and a no when they do not—that’s all I really want from my housing department.

Housing is an important part of our college experience. From what I have heard anecdotally, I am not the only one who experienced this sort of turmoil. This article was really just me being a whiner. Tell me your stories. If you plan to apply to be an RA in the future and are worried about retribution, post anonymously, but these wrongs must be aired. Maybe once and for all we can help destroy the bureaucratic red tape that defines CMC’s housing policies.

Some were placed in Stark, Fawcett, Phillips, Beckett, Marks… and some are on Pomona’s campus (south campus).

Post a comment if you hear any funny stories.