And with opposition from many masters and Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68, this extension of randomization appears unlikely.

"The quality of freshman entries overrides the advantages of assigning people early to Houses," says Elizabeth Studley Nathans, Harvard dean of freshmen.

The Weight of History

One reason Harvard is unlikely to adopt the Yale system of housing assignments is that doing so would require radically reshaping the school's philosophy toward the first year of college.

Traditionally, first-years have been encouraged to bond as a class before bonding as members of smaller House communities. First-years live in the Yard (or nearby), eat in Annenberg Hall, are advised in their first-year dorm and have a dean of freshmen, making the year unique, to be savored separately from three years of House life.

These first-year traditions were established long before the House system was created in the 1930 by President A. Lawrence Lowell, Class of 1877.

"The Harvard freshman year existed before the House system," says former Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III. "The Houses were grafted onto the freshman year tradition."

Indeed, Harvard's approach to the first year is older than the Yale system, as well.

When Yale started to establish its residential college system in 1930s, many of the Yard dorms were already nearly 50 years old. Weld Hall, for example, was built in 1873.

And Harvard's emphasis on the first-year as a class-wide bonding opportunity has survived even as Harvard has changed other aspects of its housing system, most significantly through randomization in 1995.

Administrators cite the goal of class-wide bonding as one of the most significant reasons they would like to keep the system as is.

"One thing that has occurred at Yale over the years is that students develop early and obviously warm loyalties to their colleges, rather than to their freshman dorms," Nathans writes in an e-mail message. "Thus I gather that the cohesiveness of groups in the freshman dormitories is far less than it traditionally has been here."

Harvard's first-year traditions would also make it logistically difficult to adopt a system like Yale's.

First-year dorms were not built as mini-Houses, and Nathans says the layout of the Yard dorms would make it impossible to group students in the dorms according to their House affiliations."

When the 'Yale system' (or some variant thereof) was considered here, there was never an expectation that those assigned to a particular upperclass House would also be housed together as first-year students," she writes. "The numbers wouldn't work right,' I think, given size and configuration of the Yard, Union dorms and of Apley."