Dissatisfied with The Department of Residence Life's housing process this year? Just wait until next year. With the University's current plans to substantially increase to the student body population, it's only going to get worse for both next year's first-years and upperclassmen. ResLife needs to start improving the current system and brace itself for the impending housing shortage that will inevitably begin as soon as the 2010 to 2011 academic year. At the moment it appears that ResLife isn't too partial to changing much of anything. This is a mistake. ResLife had enough trouble trying to house the Class of 2012 for this upcoming year, as we saw this month when some students who were guaranteed housing were waitlisted. It's only going to get worse.

The incoming Class of 2013 is 10 percent larger than the Class of 2012. And with an endowment that keeps on dipping, it looks as though the administration wants the size of the Class of 2014 to be just as large. The prospect of housing a large class of rising sophomores while simultaneously saving space for a large class of incoming first-years is bound to cause trouble somewhere-and it will likely be most problematic for upperclassmen.

The Justice Brandeis Semester is supposed to lessen the housing burden of the University. But until someone figures out a way to pitch the optional JBS in a financially appealing manner, I'm going to assume that there will be plenty of extra people seeking housing next March. At the moment, I just don't think anyone will be jumping at the opportunity to pay for a semester's worth of vague classes and alleged social justice.

So, in the meantime, a Brandeis housing crisis for juniors and seniors appears to be in the works. Of course, there are small things that Res Life could do to alleviate some of the stress of the housing lottery in general. Maybe they won't be able to do this for upperclassmen, who will likely lose some of their housing availability in the short run due to the increased number of underclassmen; however, there is something that Res Life can do to make the housing lottery a little more fair for rising sophomores.

It's time to get rid of neighborhood pull-ins in the Hassenfeld building of East Quad. The idea of neighborhood pull-ins seems really great at face value. But, in fact, the pull-in system currently operates much like a regressive tax policy in which those within the lower brackets are forced to suffer disproportionately to those better off. And each person's initial standing in the housing lottery is arbitrary. It is, after all, a lottery, which by definition determines everyone's fate based on pure luck.

If you're fortunate to have a low enough lottery number, you get better choices of housing. That should be enough. It makes sense to pull in for the suites because of the nature of suite life. But is this really a fair policy for Hassenfeld? No-especially in the absence of Scheffres, which will likely become a permanent first-year dorm out of necessity.

As people unnecessarily pull their friends into neighboring rooms, numbers devalue in what should be a reasonable part of the lottery spectrum, such as the upper 400s and lower 500s, at which point housing in East Quad and the Castle ran out this year (Rosenthal Quad was gone before number 100). Obviously, those with the highest numbers are in trouble either way, but it's unfair to supply the extra advantage of neighborhood pull-ins in Hassenfeld, especially in light of the fact that housing for Pomerantz, the other building in East, works out just fine without such a pull-in system in place.

Perhaps future upperclassmen are simply doomed to fight the increasingly tougher odds of not getting campus housing. But if ResLife takes a second glance at the process, they may just find a little room for improvement-for some. There is some hope for a little more fairness for rising sophomores. But we future upperclassmen might want to take advantage of the weak housing market right now, because our forthcoming housing availability is looking imminently limited.