This year, Eliza Lord ’24 is a junior in Davenport College. For the first time since she started at Yale, Lord will spend the entire academic year living within Davenport’s walls. Her suite, a well-lit configuration of four singles and one double in Davenport’s G entryway, is situated on the northern end of the college.
This arrangement is a far cry from Lord’s accommodations last year. During the 2020-21 school year, she, along with the sophomores in Branford, Davenport, Morse, and Saybrook, lived on Old Campus — the large quad typically occupied by Yale’s first-year students. Lord and her roommate shared a dark, cramped double in Vanderbilt Hall. Without a central dining hall or gym, Lord felt that Old Campus lacked the sense of community inherent to the residential colleges. She described it as a “no-man’s-land.”
Having never lived inside Davenport as an underclassman, Lord is not all that familiar with students in other classes. “I don’t know anyone the year above or the year below me in Davenport,” she said. “I think part of the purpose of living in the college your sophomore year is to know the people a year above you. So now I don’t have that experience at all.”
The result, Lord continued, is that she does not “feel connected at all to the greater Davenport community.”
Students’ sense of disconnection from their residential colleges is increasingly common. Together, ballooning undergraduate enrollment and fixed housing capacity have contributed to a current 1,357 students living off campus, according to Yale College Dean of Student Affairs Melanie Boyd. This number includes a record 35% of the junior class. Many of them have never been housed by their college––with the exception of the abbreviated fall 2020 semester during the pandemic.
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“Fourteen Colleges. One Yale.” Those words headline the section of the Yale website devoted to explaining the residential colleges that sit “at the heart of the Yale experience.” The website describes “a built-in, tight-knit family for students from the moment they arrive, blending diversity, camaraderie, and pride for one’s residential community.” Yale advertises the residential college system as an integral element of the undergraduate experience — a part of the DNA of Yale.
Yet the residential colleges could never reasonably house the entire undergraduate population. Yale expects that some share of juniors and seniors will be drawn off campus each year by the prospect of increased independence, meal flexibility, and a guaranteed single each year. But for upperclassmen who would prefer to live on campus, each time Yale’s enrollment swells, so does housing uncertainty.
COVID-19 has only exacerbated these issues. Pandemic-related gap years and deferrals led to about 335 students postponing their matriculation from fall 2020 to fall 2021. Despite this significant roll-over, Jeremiah Quinlan, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions & Financial Aid, told The Politic in an email that University leaders “decided that the admissions office would not reduce the number of admissions offers to students who applied to enroll in fall 2021 and 2022.” Over email, Boyd explained that Yale “made it a principle not to reduce the number of students admitted during COVID because we did not want to disadvantage applicants to the classes of 2024, 2025, and 2026.” The class of 2025 is now a record size of 1,789. When asked if Yale Admissions considered the implications of expanding enrollment without expanding already-strained housing options, Quinlan said, “I am grateful that we have been able to offer admission to the same number of students graduating from high school each year, and I am proud that Yale has not reduced the number of high-achieving students from all backgrounds who are receiving a Yale College education.” He did not address the impact of housing shortages on students already enrolled in Yale College.
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In 1961, the construction of Morse College and Ezra Stiles College represented Yale’s first major expansion to housing since the founding of its residential college system in 1933. Morse and Stiles were built to alleviate tremendous housing burdens. A 1958 Yale Daily News (YDN) article quoted then-University President A. Whitney Griswold saying that a $15 million gift from Paul Mellon would allow Yale to relieve “the serious handicap of overcrowding caused by the 46% increase in our total undergraduate body since the war, and to expand and strengthen the college-centered educational activities that now play a major role in the educational life of the University.”
In 1990, students in Davenport, Silliman, and Trumbull found themselves squeezed into quads originally designed to be doubles, or annexed out of their residential colleges all together. Mary Helen Goldsmith, then-Silliman Head of College, told the YDN in 1990 that “17 [Silliman] students voluntarily moved off campus when they heard housing would be tight.” The same YDN article also reported that, “many students have signed leases for off-campus housing already, fearing that they might be forced out of their residential college with not enough time to procure desirable housing.” According to another YDN article from the same year, Trumbull sophomores faced a severe crisis, with only 55 on-campus beds available for a class of 106. The situation is similar to the struggle that students in the class of 2024 faced during the spring 2022 housing draw.
Due to the untenable size of the class of 2025, many members of the class of 2024 have found that there is no space for them in their residential colleges. During the 2021-2022 school year, “I think there were 126 or so sophomores in Berkeley and like 220 [total] beds,” said Matthew McNierney ’24 in an interview with The Politic. “So [the class of 2025] was occupying more than half of the college.” He explained that the large sophomore class caused an oversubscription of about 35 students in junior housing. According to McNierney, Berkeley College was allotted 18 beds for annex housing in Old Campus’s McClellan Hall. If 17 students hadn’t elected to move off campus, they would have effectively been kicked out. Similarly, in the housing draw for the 2022-23 academic year, Davenport was originally oversubscribed by 16 beds. After six left the draw, the remaining ten juniors were annexed to an entryway in Pierson College.
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When asked to comment on housing shortages and community preservation in their residential colleges, the Deans and Heads of College of all 14 residential colleges declined.
“The residential colleges, even for students not living in them, are important communities for all undergraduates,” Boyd wrote to The Politic. She continued, “I’m pleased that we have reached a point in the pandemic where in-person events like college teas, IMs, and Mellon fora have been reinstated, and they are open to all students, whether they live on campus or off.”
Much as the residential colleges may make a valiant effort to involve the entire community in events, students contend that a certain level of community is only attained through physically living in their college. In his current room in McClellan Hall, McNierney is acutely aware of the separation from residential college life. Unlike Berkeley College, McClellan Hall has no suites. Rather, McNierney’s floor consists of standalone singles that open directly onto a long hallway. McNierney laments the loss of the common room as a social space. “It’s definitely a little bit more difficult to just see the people that I live next door to because their door is closed,” McNierney said. Despite loving his college community, McNierney shared that he “definitely [has] way less interaction with Berkeley College” due to its distance from McClellan.
Unlike McNierney, Alexa May Richards ’24 has spent all three years living in Pauli Murray, her residential college. Richards eagerly described her connections to the community. She said, “I feel like I’m constantly running into people in the college, running into Prof. T [Murray’s Head of College] . . . And I think that those just sort of happenstance things may or may not happen to someone who lives off campus.” Richards explained that many of her friends are in Murray, and she frequents events hosted there by her Head of College. “I do think it is one of the core pieces of my college experience,” she said.
Students like Richards who have lived in their college every year are more easily able to integrate themselves into their college communities. These students’ experiences are in line with the effects of proximity on relationship building that many psychologists have identified. When students are involuntarily isolated from their residential colleges, Yale’s selling point of a “built-in community” begins to fall apart.
In spring 2021, Branford College planned to add beds to rooms, turning some singles into doubles and doubles into triples. Given that Branford was not allotted annex housing, this move was necessary to accommodate the large influx of new students expected in the fall. Mark Deng ’23, a current Branford senior, moved off campus his junior year to avoid these cramped rooms. “I think residential colleges are great for the first two years, when you’re trying to establish yourself at Yale and need a community that’s readily available to you,” Deng told The Politic. “However, as time goes on, you have friend groups established all over the campus, and that’s when the physical space of residential colleges doesn’t matter that much anymore.”
Richards agreed with Deng’s assessment. “I think people get into the residential college thing to varying degrees,” he said. “And if you’re not super attached to it, then, like, it’s not that hard to move away.”
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Each spring, Yale upperclassmen wait in anticipation to learn if they have secured a spot in their residential college. Some make plans to move off campus months in advance, preferring to avoid the uncertainty of the housing draw and the disadvantages of late entry into the rental market. The students who move off campus voluntarily and those who are forced off by oversubscription both live a degree removed from their greater residential college community. They are distanced from lazy afternoons in the grassy courtyards, late nights in the butteries, and other defining characteristics of residential college life.
While COVID-related developments are in part responsible for Yale’s present space shortages, the pandemic is not the first time Yale has struggled with college housing. The University’s difficulties addressing campus housing shortages over the past 70 years suggest that the issue is structural. To ensure that residential college life is at the “heart” of the undergraduate experience, as Yale promises, the University has a couple options. If the student population remains at its current size, and especially if it continues to grow, the University could prioritize an expansion of its housing options — though this construction must address the effect an expansion would have on New Haven residents, who are already under stress as more students move off campus and drive up rents. Otherwise, enrollment numbers must shrink to reflect the current capacity of the school’s residential colleges. As it stands, Yale has not been able to house all its students.