Preserving Choice

After randomization, maintaining the blocking system also provides one of the few elements of housing choice left for students.

Lewis says the College wants to preserve this freedom, since blocking groups are such a crucial set of relationships.

"Rooming [groups are] where a lot of conversations happen, and that is fundamental to the whole concept. I take it for granted that rooming is an important part of being in college," he says.

While Harvard's randomized system has come under attack for dividing ethnic communities within Houses, the blocking system actually allows more freedom to create such communities than Yale's.

Yale controls for students' gender, race and hometown, as well as varsity athletic participation and professional-level music skills, making it unlikely that a single House would have greater-than-average representation of any of those attributes. (Yale also lets admitted students ask to live in the same College as their sibling or parent.)

But Harvard controls only for gender in making housing assignments, allowing students to create demographically unrepresentative circles of friends--at least within their blocking groups.

The freedom of Harvard's system may keep some students on campus. For while only 80 percent of Yale undergraduates live on campus, 97 percent of College students choose to remain in the House system.

And William Sledge, master of Yale's Calhoun College, says Yale students who move off campus are often looking for the kind of rooming freedom that blocking allows Harvard's undergraduates. "Some people want more independence, they want more choice," he says.

And for now, at least, masters say preserving first-year traditions and this modicum of choice outweighs the stresses associated with blocking.

"I think [our system] works just fine. I don't think there's any driving force behind looking at other things right now," Pfister says.