At Princeton, juniors and seniors compete for rooms in the upperclass lottery, and are free to live wherever they can. Some who do not want a meal plan choose to live in Spellman, which offers apartment-style living with kitchens in the suites. But a great majority of the upperclassmen live in dormitories without kitchens.

At Penn, Columbia and Cornell students can choose among almost all rooms on campus, and they compete for them through lottery systems, all of them complicated.

Harvard is far from being the only school where students complain about the housing lottery. In fact, students at almost all Ivy schools launch criticism against the way their school determines who will live where.

At Columbia, according to freshman Mario E. Hurtado, nobody knows what goes on in the lottery, but that students plot, scheme and second-guess to no end.

Despite the cut-throat aura of Penn's "Grand Arena," or general lottery, most people manage to find a satisfactory place to live, students say. "You can just about always get a room in a high-rise, which is actually pretty nice," says freshman Will Fox.

The general rule among the ancient eight is that seniors are awarded an advantage over other students in the lottery, and it is often said that students endure misconveniences in early year, waiting for payday when they are upperclassmen. Cornell is the sole exception to this rule, where seniors are given no advantage over underclassmen in the lottery system.

In fact, Cornell is the exception to almost every Ivy League housing rule, because only 36 percent of the 12,600 undergraduates live in university housing. Penn is the school where the second smallest percentage of students live in school housing; there, 75 percent choose to live on campus.

The relatively small number of students living on campus at Penn and Cornell can be traced to the flourishing Greek systems at each school. Cornell's 50 fraternities and 16 sororities have memberships that account for 37 percent of the men and 29 percent of the women at the school, according to the Barron's Guide to College.

In addition off-campus housing in Ithaca and the surrounding areas is plentiful and relatively inexpensive. "By the time they're juniors, most people want to live off-campus," says Gerry Fenech, a Cornell senior.

Fenech has lived off-campus for two years, and says that the main disadvantage to eschewing university housing is the distance between his room and classes. "A lot of people, like me, live up to, up 15 or 20 minutes from the center of campus. It's long walk," he says.

When students aren't complaining about the lottery system, a common theme is the disrepair of the rooms.

"I think the rooms get painted regularly, and it seems like all needed repairs get done," says Brown freshman Anne Boyd. But "the hallways are a mess, thought, and there was a flood in a dorm a while ago." she says.

Students voice complaints, but they sometimes find reasons to choose to live in dilapidated domiciles. "A lot of freshmen and upperclassmen put up with low-life rooms and really bad bathrooms in the Quad because it's really partying place to," says Fox about a University of Pennsylvania dorm.

Several schools including Princeton and Dartmouth, are extensively repairing some of their dorms.

The ongoing debate at Dartmouth over whether or not to make residential clusters more cohesive exemplifies a split between different Ivy League housing systems.