The difference between Munger Hall [2] and the new UCSB dorm [1] is vast. For starters you go from a 7 person common room being your nearest real light to a 60-70 person common room being your nearest indoor natural light. The Michigan dorm has a fraction of the people living in it total, larger rooms and amenities that would be hard to include in the UCSB simply because there's so many more people in that doom.

You expect a quality difference between graduate apartments and undergraduate dorms but saying one is well received (with complaints about the lack of windows and lights in the bedrooms btw) so this different design must also be secretly ok is stretching things.

[1] https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2021/11/munger-hall-univer... [2] https://i.redd.it/81yfb7wkxby51.jpg