We need to be able to leave our colleges

In 2007, the University started its expanded residential college system, which entails that freshmen and sophomores must live in the residential college assigned to them in the summer before they arrive at the University. Additionally, they must buy the associated meal plan (although anyone with a meal plan can eat in any college). The intention of this system is to foster a sense of community among smaller subdivisions of the Princeton population. It is my belief that allowing people to change residential colleges before their sophomore year would help to realize this goal more effectively.

Princeton students stay in their colleges for two years so that they continue to eat and attend study breaks with the same people in order to build a community. However, different colleges have dramatically different levels of community spirit and loyalty. For example, Butler College is centrally located, so people from all colleges use its common areas. This means that students in Butler are not necessarily always seeing the same faces the way a student in Forbes College might. Essentially, the college system is not enough, on its own, to build a community. Other factors, such as geographical isolation, are also apparently necessary.

If students picked their own colleges after freshman year, there would be a stronger sense of community by virtue of the fact that the colleges were deliberately picked. A student in a college would know that most other sophomores had chosen to be there with them. Students would also feel a greater connection to their colleges because they would have picked the one most suited to their personal needs. For example, someone might value the up-campus location and Gothic architecture of Rockefeller College or Mathey College, or they might decide they like the central location and amenities of Butler or the small, homey feeling of Forbes.

Of course, there are limited spots in every college, but this problem could easily be decided through the existing lottery system. The only difference is that all rising sophomores would enter the same room draw rather than being divided by college. People would receive favorable or unfavorable positions purely by luck, just as they do now.

If the University still wanted to have the continuity of living in the same place for two years, it could incentivize staying in your native college by giving people who remain in their colleges better spots on the list. In this way, if you don’t feel like your college fits you, you can still easily leave. However, there is also still a good reason to stay. Either way, you would have a choice, and choosing is what would make the community stronger.

This change would also give more people the opportunity to make the best choices in roommates for sophomore year. Although the small size of the University’s student population combined with the advisee group system ensures that almost all students have friends in their respective colleges, that doesn’t mean that everyone finds the best roommate in their respective colleges. It is not uncommon to have a best friend in another college. It could significantly improve some people’s standard of living if they could choose from a larger pool of potential roommates. It seems unfair to limit arbitrarilythe people with whom students can live to people who happened to be randomly placed in the same residential college as them.

In any case, continuing to mandate the meal plan for freshmen and sophomores would ensure that there is an underlying sense of community. Most underclassmen eat in all of the college dining halls. The way we use the dining halls to socialize and connect would not significantly change if we were allowed to leave our colleges after freshman year.

We could only benefit from being allowed a little more freedom in our choice of location. The college system itself could only benefit from having engaged residents who chose to be there.