When David Stollman set off for his freshman year, the never expected his Ivy League school to assign him to a modern suite on the 11th floor of a 24-floor high-rise, an apartment with a large living room, a kitchen, a bathroom and two bedrooms for there people.

While a generation ago most Ivy Leaguers lived in buildings of the traditional architecture that marks much of Stollman's school, the University of Pennsylvania, today there is a wide range of rooming arrangements and housing systems throughout the ancient eight.

Harvard students encounter an uncomplicated housing system. More than 90 percent of students lives on campus, with sophomores, juniors and seniors staying in the mainly neo-Georgian houses for three years with all meals provided for them, whether they like them or not.

But other schools offer students a more mobile college experience, with options ranging from apartment style living with no meal plan to the type of patriarchal system that found its way to Harvard and Yale via Oxford.

Penn, for instance, offers a wide range of rooming options for students, including living in its Quad, whose gothic architecture is popular with students for providing the flavor of tradition they say the high rises lack.

The housing options offered by the ancient eight run the gamut from a Columbia-owned apartment near Harlem to the medieval fortress like grey stone dormitories at Princeton.

The lottery systems that as sign the rooms to the students are likewise vastly different. Yale's system is relatively simple, while Columbia students say that they have spent years unsuccessfully trying to understand their school's baffling system.

One of the greatest differences between the housing systems of the Ivy League is the degree of control the student have over where they will live. In some, students can ride the system and hop from one type of room to another each semester, while their colleagues at other school, like Harvard, are required to live in one dorm for three or even four of their college year.

Before they even arrive for their fall term of their freshman year, Yalies are randomly assigned to one of 12 residential colleges. The first year, they generally live in an all freshman yard with classmates in their college, then move to the college itself.

Although it is possible to switch colleges between years, very few students choose to take this option housing officers say. Freshman Jamison Williams, a member of the housing committee at Yale's Ezra Stiles College, says that this year only eight students of the college's 400 had transferred out of Stiles, which students describe as one of Yale's least-likes colleges.

Student at all other Ivy League schools, with the exception of Harvard, have more freedom to move around to different dorms on campus then do their counterparts at Yale, and experience different type of room arrangements and meal plans.

At Dartmouth students from all four years live together in "clusters," groups of two or three dorm buildings that contain 75 to 100 students each, seeming to from the equivalent of a House within the College.

But students and administrators say that after freshman year students are free to switch clusters, and often, if they receive low lottery numbers or if their cluster is particularly popular, they cannot get a room in the same cluster and have to move.

Because of the four-quarter "Dartmouth Plan," which requires students to take fall. winter or if spring term off during their sophomore and junior years, there is a high student turnover rate that leads students to change roommate frequently.

"The housing system must allow for this," says Murray Burk director of student housing at Dartmouth. He says that it was not uncommon for student to live in as many as six different rooms during their four years at the school.