A room with a view

Whenever I buy airline tickets, the first thing I do is pick out my seat. As you have probably found through experience, there is nothing more irritating than being stuck in the back of a plane in a middle seat.

On the flight back to Philadelphia last week, I sat in an aisle seat in the front, just what I wanted. There was no doubt about it; I had selected 5B weeks in advance when I made the reservation, and I knew what to expect.

When I got back to campus, I was greeted with a flyer in my mailbox from Housing and Conference Services which asked, "Where are you going to live next year?"

In the interest of being fully honest with students, what the ad really should be saying is, "If you want to live on campus, we'll tell you where you are going to live."

After all, students who choose to live on campus really are not given much of a choice as to which room and often which building they will inhabit. And this just plays into the common mantra of housing at Penn: that we are all somehow beholden to Housing and Conference Services and uniquely privileged to live in their buildings.

Once again, the University is forgetting that we -- the students and anyone else who lives on campus -- are their customers, not their subjects. We pay rent, and a handsome sum at that considering what we get in return.

I understand the need to keep things organized under an umbrella of bureaucracy, but no respectable landlord or apartment complex would have prospective tenants fill out a form with their top 15 preferences and then arbitrarily assign them choice number eight. But yet, this is what goes on every year here.

It is about time the University started addressing housing the same way any other business operates -- by giving customers choice.

Instead of sorting through a mountain of request forms, Housing and Conference Services should develop a Web-based interface that actually allows students to choose their room and roommates themselves, in real time. Airlines have been doing this for years, and it is an exponentially more challenging endeavor in the airline industry with hundreds of thousands of customers being served each day. Even Wharton manages group-study rooms in Huntsman Hall this way.

Airlines make it easy by allowing you to see a map of the available seats so that you can weigh all of your options and then make a selection. Something this straightforward would make sense for room selection, as it would allow students to choose from the next-best alternatives when their ideal room is not available.

Some people prefer to be on higher floors, while others want the convenience of being able to use the stairs. Some prefer the view to the east, while other might like the west. Why not allow people to make these decisions for themselves?

Here's how such a system could work:

Students will have first choice to retain their current room if they so desire.

The system would then be opened to requests by upperclassmen or people who currently live in that building. Registration could begin at a certain time, and rooms would be reserved on a first-come, first-served basis. This way people who really care can get the first crack at the best available rooms. After the first day, the system could be opened to freshmen and sophomores or anyone else who wants to live in a particular building.

One person in a group of roommates could reserve a room and others could select it from a list to join. If all of this is done in real time, there will be less confusion about whether or not specific roommate requests get fulfilled.

The whole process could be completed in less than a week and would undoubtedly create less work for Housing and Conference Services if in fact requests could be filled by an automated system. Plus, there would be no waiting for weeks only to find out that someone in an administrative office made a typo and slotted you into Hill.

The fundamental issue here is consumer choice. As soon as the University's service entities are willing to consider us as consumers -- and let market forces prevail -- many of the things students dislike about the bureaucratic side of Penn may begin to improve. And there is no better place to start than at home.

Jeff Shafer is a junior marketing and management concentrator from Columbia Falls, Mont., and Editorial Page Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. Par for the Course appears on alternate Thursdays.

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