Should the College implement the proposals of the Committee on the First-Year Experience, it will become the last Ivy League schools to provide primarily freshman residence halls.
Also, if Dartmouth decides to group freshmen by their seminar, it will still be unique because no other Ivy League school bases first-year housing on a seminar or academic concentration.
The First-Year Committee recommended a host of changes to revamp the first-year experience. The biggest suggestion was to set aside three clusters for first-year students, with a senior faculty member living in a house close to each cluster.
Columbia University, Harvard University and Princeton University have residential programs very similar to the plan proposed by the committee.
At Princeton, freshmen and sophomores are housed together in five dormitories on campus.
"There are approximately 500 student in each two-year dorm including 250 freshman and sophomores," said Joseph Plakfa, Princeton's assistant director of undergraduate housing.
"The college system was set up in the early 80's in response to acclimating first-and-second-year students to the rigors of Princeton and establishing a sense of community within their respective classes," Plafka said.
Plafka said the housing plan allows Princeton to focus its attention on first-and-second-year students.
"We do that with a highly specialized staff which includes residential advisors, college masters, a director of studies, college administrators and minority affairs advisers," Plakfa said.
Graduate students and staff members are housed with freshmen in these halls, Plafka said, but upperclassmen do not have any residential staff members living in dorms.
At Harvard, all freshmen live together in residence halls.
"Students are not allowed to indicate roommate choice so that they can branch off from and discover people out of their immediate niches," said Tom Dingman, Harvard's assistant dean of the college houses.
Dingman said the houses are not grouped by academics.
"Each member of the dorm is selected to represent the make-up of their class. There is a real effort to reflect the diversity of the class," Dingman said.
Harvard's housing system, established in the early 1930s, houses proctors, graduate students, and residential staff members with freshmen.
Dingman said the first-year program helps to establish class unity because residential houses for upperclassmen are based on tutorials.
At Columbia, freshmen are housed together so that the college will "better serve the needs of first-year students," said Cyndi Cogdill, the university's first-year coordinator.
The program, which began two years ago, was implemented along with a comprehensive first-year program that staffs houses with residential advisers and provides academic advising to freshmen, Cogdill said.
Brown University, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University have long-standing traditions of housing freshmen together.
At Yale the freshman students are housed in 12 residential colleges on the "old campus," Betty Trachtenberg, Yale's dean of student affairs.
Tachtenberg said Yale's first-year residential staff includes freshman counselors to provide support and information for freshmen.
At Brown, Assistant Dean of Student Life Donald Duroucher said the residential-life program includes a first-year counseling unit composed of undergraduates, minorities, peer counselors and women to help new students adjust to college life.
At Penn, first-year students are housed together in order to provide first-year students with guaranteed housing, according to Mark Griswold, an undergraduate assignment counselor at Penn.
Within the first-year housing, the university also has other programs geared toward strengthening community within the class, which are planned by residential directors, Griswold said.
"Actually a lot of freshman prefer staying together. It allows them to make friends and acclimate them to the College surroundings," he said.
At Cornell, incoming students have a choice of living on the west campus, which is primarily freshmen, and the east campus, which is mixed.
An administrative assistant in Cornell's Residential Life Office said most freshmen choose to be to be housed with other freshmen. Also, dormitories on west campus are closer to the main hub of the university, she said.
