In the midst of the housing process, the school has come close to turning into a soapy teen melodrama as backs are stabbed and friendships are terminated over next year’s living arrangements. For the past week, boarders have been struggling to decide where they would most like to live next year, but faced with difficult decisions, they have virtually no guarantee, and little chance, of admission into their top-choice. What causes the most anxiety for students is choosing with whom and where they plan to live. As roommates are chosen and groups apply for stacks, betrayal becomes inevitable, but despite the tears that are inevitably shed, it is likely that the decided situation will be forced into reconsideration. The problem with the entire process is the inability of the cluster deans to provide students with sufficient information to make plausible arrangements. Most students need information prior to submitting pull-in requests, stack applications, and lottery drawings, yet it is not until after receiving requests that cluster deans conjecture what dorms posses what openings. The deans, however, have a minimal way of determining where space is available before such requests are received. Flagstaff Cluster Dean Clyfe Beckwith gave his assessment of the process stating, “The housing process is a multi-variable jumble that requires anticipation and patience.” They say patience is a virtue, but patience is difficult to maintain when students have so little time to make a decision that has so great an impact on a whole year of their Andover experience. Students need more time between each step of the process to re-evaluate their housing position and alter their arrangements accordingly. Dean Beckwith disagrees. “How much time do students need?” he said. ?“Will it ever be enough time?” If a group is rejected for a stack, for example, it is almost impossible for them to find an available roommate, submit a pull-in request, find a room in their present dorm, or decide to enter the upper-class lottery in what little time they have before their chosen alternative is due. The rejection of stacks and pull-in requests leaves students struggling to find a decent alternative at the last minute, but students still fear entering the lottery-system due to its apparent faults and near entire dependence on luck. Currently the all-school lottery for upperclassmen includes both genders, a system that lacks reason due to the gender segregation between dorms. For students to have a better sense of the quality of their draw, males and females need to draw from separate lotteries. As of now, if a female draws a 100, for example, she could be the first or 100th female draw, as the gender of those who drew below 100 is unknown. Furthermore, students are unable to execute the immediate choosing of their dorm preference, upon availability, when their number is drawn. When a student is entered in the lottery, he or she submits a list of dorm preferences before receiving a a dorm assignment in his of her mailbox days later. Upon selection of lottery numbers, the cluster deans should present the available rooms of each dorm and allow the students, in order of lottery draw, to choose an available room in the dorm of their greatest preference. The immediate decision upon the draw solidifies the justice in the lottery assignments. And although students would like to think that the system operates as it would if they could in on the decisions, many, surprised by some results, still question whether priority in some dorms is reserved for favored athletes or other students. Throughout the process, it seems that students know little about how their fates for the following year are determined. We lack the information needed to perceive the most probable decision, and thus are left determining alternative after alternative situation when let down by the fate of the draw. Additionally, I hope that the lottery system and housing process as a whole will be made more transparent in order to both resolve the anxiety that comes with awaiting housing decisions and address any doubt about the fairness of the system. Whitney Ford is a one-year Lower. wford@andover.edu
