The four-year colleges are now just 20 months from opening their doors. While information continues to emerge about the colleges, several truly fundamental questions remain publicly unanswered.
Most importantly, the administration has not yet explained how it is going to handle the variability of student interest in the four-year colleges. Colleges are expensive, physical structures that cannot quickly expand and contract their capacities to match the whims of the student body. Thus, in any given year, it is incredibly unlikely that student interest in four-year colleges will happen to exactly coincide with their physical capacity.
If interest outpaces capacity, the University will face a tough decision: exclude interested students from the kind of college experience they want (and whose purported availability may well have attracted them to Princeton in the first place) or dilute the residential experience by forcing a portion of each college's membership to live elsewhere. Conversely, if student interest is low, the University will be forced to place otherwise uninterested students in four-year college beds, thereby diluting the community atmosphere.
Similarly, the University must decide how students will be placed into two and four-year residential colleges, and what flexibility students will be given in terms of changing their minds. Current plans do not require freshmen to make a permanent decision about two-year versus four-year college membership. This is reasonable since freshmen cannot be expected to have a clear idea of what sort of living and eating arrangements they will prefer when they are juniors.
But this arrangement also means that the four-year residential colleges will experience a significant turnover as students from the two-year colleges move in and those already in the college move out junior year. The motivation behind creating the four-year colleges was to create a set of communities on campus, but a true community exists only to the extent that there is continuity in its membership.
And, of course, there are still a host of issues regarding the relationship between the eating clubs and the four-year colleges that remain unanswered. Most importantly, the University has to decide exactly what kind of meal plan college residents will have to purchase (if any), knowing that this decision will essentially define the club/college dynamic for years to come.
Ultimately, these questions — and many others like them — will need to be answered. Because the University has chosen a flexible system for its undergraduates, the answers to these questions are not likely to be perfect. Nevertheless, students deserve timely answers, particularly those in the Class of 2010 who will decide in the months to come if Princeton is the right place for them. Thus, the board would like to call on the University to release a public statement twice a semester to update students on plans for the residential colleges. The sooner the University begins to publicly describe its thinking, the sooner an open, public discussion on these issues can begin.
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