Recently, the housing lottery process began for third, fourth, and fifth form students. However, this year, because of a variety of factors, six changes — more than the usual two or three — to housing arrangements have been made. Atwater House will become a fourth and fifth form girls’ dorm; Chapel House a sixth form boys’ dorm; Edsall House the all-gender dorm; Quantrell a sixth form boys’ dorm; Lewis House a sixth form girls’ dorm; and Memorial House Garden a fifth form boys’ dorm.
Every February, the Financial Office sets an enrollment target after viewing the budget plan for the upcoming year. According to Mr. Will Morris, Director of Residential Life, this year’s enrollment target was 638 boarding students and 212 day students. The Dean’s Office then report the number of spaces available for new students: 190 this year. This number is then divided into eight sections — one for each grade level and gender — and sent to the Admissions Office, whose goal is to offer the appropriate number of admissions to ensure that the number of acceptances are close to the target number of students for each section. “There’s a lot of uncertainty around that; it’s a very hard thing to do. Once you make the offer, it’s out there,” Mr. Morris said.
After April 11, when all offers are finalized, the resulting yield is reviewed. “Every year, there is an unexpected outcome. We have to make adjustments to accommodate the enrollment that has resulted from both returning students and newly admitted students, so that’s one of the factors that would lead us to have to make a change in house program,” Mr. Morris said. For instance, because of a large number of fourth and fifth form girls accepting offers of admission this year, Atwater House is being switched to a fourth and fifth form girls’ dorm.
However, there was some debate behind switching Memorial House back into the third and fifth form boys’ dorm that it had been three years ago. “A few years ago, we had really tried to make [Memorial House] a consistent ninth-grade experience, but this year, the enrollment for ninth grade boys came in under,” Mr. Morris said. Memorial House is not the only dorm to be switched into its previous model; Atwater House, Louis House, and Chapel House will all be returning to arrangements the dorms have seen before.
The second major factor that affected next year’s housing arrangements was the all-gender house, located in Edsall House. “We made the decision for a variety of different reasons to site that program in a house that had been a sixth form boys’ house,” Mr. Morris said. As a result, Quantrell House will turn into a sixth form boys’ dorm, and Chapel House, in exchange for the girls at Edsall House, will also become a sixth form boys’ dorm.
“Our dorms are just barely big enough to meet the capacity campus-wide,” Mr. Morris. “So it’s not as if I can look at Atwater and say, ‘Well, Atwater’s got sixteen boys in, but I just need to put six boys in there, so I’m going to keep it as a sixth-form boys’ dorm and leave ten beds empty.’ It’s really driven by our tight housing model and the reality that we need to really optimize usage and not leave beds empty.”
He added, “Our boarding target was 638 students; the original model had 640 available beds on campus, so we had a two-bed cushion. At present, we’re over-enrolled by a bit, so we’ve had to figure out how we’re going to configure things so that we can actually create a bit more space for students.”
Mr. Morris agreed that switching house arrangements affects dorm culture: “We’re going to have some new cultures established certainly in the dorms like Edsall, Quantrell, Atwater, and Chapel, and that’s okay — that happens. The culture changes every year because the lottery shuffles things up, so I think there will be some changes, but that’s a part of our annual cycle.”
Mr. LJ Spinnato, who has been advising in Quantrell for the past four years, said, “I think Quantrell is a smaller four-five dorm that could make a great little fraternity house of a sixth-form house. The one thing that’s different is that all senior houses are houses; Quantrell is so clearly built as a dorm. I always like knowing that if you look at buildings on campus — if it’s red brick, then it looks like a dorm. So this will buck the trend. But the reality is that housing needs to be flexible to adapt to enrollment. As long as you manage it correctly with students buying into being a part of a good dorm culture, we can be flexible.”
Mr. Carey Kopeikin, Head of Memorial House, said, “Every year is going to be a different change in culture in a dorm like Memorial House, where you’ve got a majority of people who are new to the school. But I think, overall, it will be a positive thing, and I think that the third formers will get to see, ‘Oh wow, this is what junior spring looks like — we better get ready to start working now — as opposed to senior spring.’”
Despite the extra confusion that switched housing arrangements may add to the housing lottery process, Mr. Morris said, “Our housing situations are all good places to live. They’re not all the same, but we found year over year the annual surveys that we do and through talking with students, that students generally have positive dorm experiences, ranging between very good and excellent. I would just remind students that as much as there is this kind of uncertainty — that uncertainty is always part of the lottery process — in the end, students can expect to have a good experience, no matter where they end up.”
