During room draw this past week for fall 2026 housing, students at Pomona College have reported trading and bidding for housing selection times — including thousand-dollar bids and internship offers. This follows the college’s decision to demolish the Oldenborg Center in May and subsequently reduce on-campus housing.
“I heard about a ton of instances of people bribing people — with money, with tickets to sports games, with internships,” Celeste Garton PO ’27 said. “Just the fact that that was even part of the conversation was ridiculous.”
Taking down Oldenborg, a 120-bed language residence hall, is part of the college’s $125 million Center for Global Engagement (CGE) project to replace the dorm, dining facility and language center. CGE is set to open in fall 2028 and, once completed, will house 200 students.
In response to the reduced housing capacity for the next academic year, Pomona has begun restructuring existing residence halls. Lawry Court, initially intended to serve as an interim language residence hall, has now been opened to the broader student body for the fall 2026 term. Changes are also coming to Mudd residence hall, which has historically housed First-Years, according to Josh Scacco, the director of campus life operations at Pomona.
“Harwood was shifted to be Junior and Sophomore housing and Mudd was shifted to Sophomore housing. Wig, Lyon, and Blaisdell will be [a] majority First-Year Housing throughout the two-year construction of the Center for Global Engagement,” Scacco wrote in an email statement to TSL.
The college also began adding more beds to dorms to meet housing demand. Many designated singles have been converted to doubles, while doubles have been transitioned to triples, according to Scacco.
Each spring, students participate in a room selection process in which they receive randomized time slots that determine when they can log in to the housing portal to choose their rooms for the upcoming semester. Time slots begin at 5 p.m. and cycle every three minutes until late that night, with a 15-minute break at the beginning of each hour. Students typically form roommate groups in advance, and the earliest time a group member receives determines when the entire group picks its room. This allows students to secure specific residence halls or pull friends into shared housing arrangements. Students with later times often face more limited options, such as rooms with fewer amenities such as air conditioning.
This year, students said that dorm discrepancies became more obvious. With high-quality housing concentrated in a small number of residence halls, selection times carried greater weight, and students increasingly relied on coordination within their friend groups to secure desirable placements.
“I heard about a ton of instances of people bribing people — with money, with tickets to sports games, with internships,”
“I heard about a ton of instances of people bribing people — with money, with tickets to sports games, with internships.”
Tendo Lumala PO ’28 noted that the process quickly shifted away from a straightforward lottery. With a 7:43 p.m. selection time, he was not optimistic about his options and spent several days attending housing meetings with other students, trying to secure earlier time slots through informal arrangements.
As the process unfolded, Lumala stated that seniors with earlier time slots formed and reshaped groups, strategically adding members and swapping rooms to secure their desired housing.
Lumala noted that a larger network of friends at Pomona provided students with better housing opportunities.
“It’s not fair. The larger your social group is, the easier it is,” he said.
But even when students secure relatively early times through friends, outcomes remain uncertain.
Georgia Stettner PO ’27 stated that she was unable to secure a four-person suite despite a friend with a 5:39 p.m. timeslot pulling her into a roommate group on the portal.
Stettner said the hectic pace of this year’s housing cycle was driven by the quality gap between limited suite-style dorms and an increase in less desirable forced doubles and triples.
“It just felt like a very tense emotional process,” Stettner said. “It feels unfair because there are such differences in quality of life. It seems to be a randomized lottery, but it leads to people doing sort of questionable things.”
As pressure intensified, students noted that the process extended beyond informal coordination to resemble a marketplace for housing times.
“I had perhaps the most stressful three days trying to figure out what my housing would look like,” Lumala said.
Lumala said he received a call from a first-year student on the day designated for rising seniors to choose their housing — which takes place two days before the freshmen draw — who said someone was willing to pay $4,000 for a prime time slot. Stettner also said others bid for time slots, including offers of up to $2,500 or other incentives such as summer job opportunities.
“When you have such a stark difference between living in Sontag or Dialynas and living in something like a Clark double, that gets people really riled up and willing to do whatever it takes,” Stettner said.
As housing becomes more competitive and transactional, some students said the process has begun to erode the sense of stability and connection that residential life is meant to provide.
“I really do think that the beautiful thing about a residential college is the way that you can find and build community with people,” Lumala said. “And when you have a housing situation that specifically challenges that ability, it just fractures a lot of what Pomona is supposed to be.”