A few hours before this paper goes to press, the application period for Stanford’s arcane housing selection process – the “Draw” – came to a close. Compared to peer institutions, Stanford is in the relatively unique position of guaranteeing on-campus housing for a full four years and still offers a remarkably heterogeneous portfolio of residential options: Stanford Student Housing comprises 78 residences, including traditional co-ed dorms, independent houses, suites, and apartments. Of these 78 residences, there are four academic theme houses, four focus houses, four ethnic theme houses, four language and culture houses, 10 Greek houses, and seven co-ops. For comparison, upperclassmen at schools like Harvard or Yale are essentially assigned to one of twelve houses, with little opportunity to explore housing options.

Stanford’s Residential and Dining Enterprises deserves praise for recent work on improving the undergraduate housing experience. As enrollment increased during the 1990s, Student Housing was unable to keep up with the demand for beds, and many residences were “stuffed”: triples were converted to quads, doubles to triples, and singles to doubles – there are likely some on campus who remember the infamous “mini-doubles” in the Lagunita complex. The last three or four years has seen a welcome reversal of this trend. The completion of the Munger complex allowed Crothers to become an undergraduate residence, which then allowed Housing to un-stuff residences, most notably in Toyon and Branner. With a rough back-of-the-envelope calculation using data from the Housing website, the Editorial Board estimates that a rather large 60 percent of upperclassmen now live in either a single, a two-room double, or another similarly private space, which is a commendable accomplishment. Calculated separately, a third of Stanford upperclassmen live on the Row or other independent houses. Clearly we have a plethora of attractive housing options.

As 98 percent of students opt to live in Stanford housing for four years, a system as complex as the Draw is perhaps necessary to support Stanford’s housing system. However, we believe that the system is still lacking in transparency and that small but meaningful reforms could improve the experience for students. For instance, releasing more details on how the auxiliary factors that impact the outcome of the Draw – like gender, ethnicity, priority status, and the proportion of pre-assigning students in the house – function would be a welcome move for many.

But most importantly, we find problematic Student Housing’s policy of publishing detailed Draw cutoff numbers after the Draw results are announced yet deliberately taking this information off of its website during the summer. Housing rightfully argues that students fare better in the Draw if they create a robust list of every residence of interest and that Draw cutoffs can vary tremendously between years. Yet Housing then wrongfully concludes that providing cutoff numbers befuddles our judgment and causes us to produce poor options lists. We believe that this is an inappropriate stance to take, particularly because withholding basic information inhibits students from making informed decisions about topics like Draw group size or the choice to live off-campus. Withholding cutoff data also encourages students to seek out information from upperclassmen; often, this information is misleading if not downright incorrect, thereby further confusing students.

In an email sent to all students this past Friday, Housing accused The Stanford Daily’s “A Guide to the Housing Draw,” published Friday, as propagating incomplete and thus misleading information. The administrators then affirmed their stance of taking down cutoff data over the summer. Yet the easiest solution to ensure that students receive the complete information is to simply maintain the cutoff data on the Housing website. In short, Housing’s insistence on taking down the data not only leads to students making less informed decisions with rankings lists, but is demeaning to the intelligence of Stanford students.

Overall, the Editorial board is pleased with the campus housing situation at Stanford, though we believe that increased transparency could improve the system even more for future years. We hope Housing takes these points into consideration when crafting policies for coming years.