Could wifi with a university network drop often because of a 5ghz band connection?

Hey guys,
I've been having wifi issues at my school/work (same location) with the connection dropping randomly. It seems to happen several times an hour. I purchased a MBA months ago and had no problems with wifi connectivity till recently. My school has acquired a new access point in the facility. It was right around the release of Mavericks. So now I've become unclear on whether it's the network or the new OS. Anyways, the network is WPA 2 enterprise with dual-band connectivity. This past week I have done my fair share of studying on dual-band technology and now understand perks and downfalls to 2.4ghz versus 5ghz bands. That reading was due to a connection issue at home. However, today I finally realized that I was connected to the 5ghz band at work/school by using the option key and clicking the wifi icon. After browsing through several forums, I was still unsure if A) the 5ghz band was responsible for wifi dropping, and B) Whether or not I could disable the wifi from defaulting to the 5ghz and use 2.4ghz as a solution instead.
Since I could not find answers to those two questions I have tried the following...
I changed the MTU to "1453" since it's the so-called "magic number" for mac's. And yes, so far it is the magic number because the wifi has not dropped once since applying it. I'm still standing by, convinced it will drop. Wireless diagnostics is currently monitoring if it does. Typically I use the ethernet adapter so I don't have to worry about any of this. That's a fix, but not the one I'm looking for. It's flat out annoying! I know I can try renewing the DHCP lease as well. I haven't done it yet because I'm seeing if the MTU was the sole source of the problem. I've already performed basic troubleshooting and like usual it didn't solve anything. That's not to say that restarting doesn't cover a higher percentage of issues!
Honestly the MTU change could be the end of my problems, but I'd still like some insight on my two questions in the first paragraph. Any guidance is strongly appreciated. I've been loving my mac and the community since I made the switch not too long ago. I'm just still familiarizing myself with everything. Thanks in advance for any help!

That's correct.
When it's unable to obtain an IP address from a DHCP server, machines are supposed to self-assign themselves an address from the 169.254.x.x range.
This is so that you can, for example, connect two machines with an Ethernet cable or via Wi-Fi without the need for a DHCP server and the two machines will be able to talk to each other.
(If you care, you can read the technical details here.)
So the big question here is why your machine is failing to obtain an address via DHCP, and it sounds like an issue with the DHCP servers on your network.
If you want to read more than you probably would ever want to know about how one campus is dealing with similar issues, you can here.)

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