By Thucydides
Every Housing Day, the same controversies arise. We hate the quad. We are wrong to hate the quad. We want to block with athletes, singer-songwriters, linking groups, or pure strangers. Harvard’s housing lottery has become a stunning demonstration of the human urge to find patterns in randomness. With only a few slight changes, though, Harvard could have a peerless barometer of residential life, while providing a much-needed leg-up to first generation low-income and similarly disadvantaged students.
First, blocking groups should not be assigned to housing at random. Instead, they should rank all twelve Houses in order of preference. Groups will then be ranked by average financial aid received per member, with highest being prioritized, and something like the Expository Writing course lottery will take place: every group gets the House they most prefer that has not already been filled by higher-priority students. The most desirable housing will initially go to the students who, off campus, have the deck most stacked against them.
These preliminary housing assignments would be distributed without the public fanfare seen in the current lottery. They would be confidential, which is crucial for what follows: anyone can either choose to keep their assignment or to put it up for auction on an anonymous platform run by Harvard. The auction winners and their respective sellers would trade their housing assignments. (If our administration thought this proposal was too expensive to run pro bono, they could take, say, 5% of each winning bid.). After a week, Housing Day is held, and each House gets to see who is actually going to live there.
In short, housing assignments become a commodity, and the value of that commodity is then used to supplement financial aid.
Everyone benefits. Harvard gets a way to measure the true value that students place on each House, which could then be used to prioritize maintenance and renovation, redirect funding, or even encourage a few people to quit ringing their anger-inducingly loud bells at all hours. Lower-income students, meanwhile, get not only aid but also agency: whether they want superior housing or the extra money that they could get by selling their places is entirely up to them. The wealthy get the chance to buy their way into the best housing, thereby no longer having to risk forgetting the extent to which they are superior to the rest of us, and the rest of us get the fun of watching the latest proto-plutocrat drop $10k on what is still, in the end, only a slightly better room in a college dorm. Sophomores, juniors, and seniors, rather than first-years, are now the ones surprised on Housing Day, which means three years of exciting mystery rather than just one.
If this system proved to work in practice, it could easily be extended to other lotteries on campus: Expos, sections, and even room assignments. All are chances to balance out a little of the inequality inherent in our world today. Or, we could bring all of them together into one unified scheme by creating a “medium of lottery exchange.” Students could earn credits by taking a lower seat than their assigned position in some lotteries, with more dramatic ones like Housing Day paying better, which could then be spent to purchase higher seats in others or trading them on an open market. Harvard Financial Analysts Club and Harvard College Consulting Group could design the exchange, and The Crimson could report the price every day, which would be nice for them since reporting stock prices is something that real newspapers do.
Economics is the largest concentration at Harvard College, and Harvard Business School is right across the Charles River, but we have somehow sleepwalked into having an administration that allows something as crucial as housing to be determined by randomness. This cannot stand. Half of Harvard’s students say that it should be designed to help its poorest members; the other half say that it should teach its richest to get even richer. Taking control of lotteries will be an inestimable boost to both.
Michael Kielstra ’22 (pmkielstra@college.harvard.edu) enjoys writing under a pseudonym.