<p>SCU ? santa clara university??
there goes your credibility, lol!</p>
<p>I’m moving on to other threads that aren’t a waste of my time…</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-southern-california/1126928-safe-neighborhood-eh.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/university-southern-california/1126928-safe-neighborhood-eh.html</a></p>
<p>Since I was the first one to make a negative remark on this thread (although made in jest) - I apologize. I didn’t mean to offend anyone by it. I’ll refrain next time.</p>
<p>And for clarification: One luxury apartment complex for UCLA: It sits atop Trader Joe’s. I’m sure that there are more.</p>
<p>The dorms at Mizzou range from traditional to quite nice. My son stayed in one of the ‘quite nice’ ones last year. It was still a simple rectangular room but had it’s own bathroom shared with the room next door. Each floor had a small kitchen and living room. It was located next to the favorite dining hall. The other dorms are older and have the community bathrooms down the hall.</p>
<p>Campus is surrounded by nice apartment complexes. Some are within walking distance and the others include a free shuttle bus that runs every 30 minutes to campus. Freshman are primarily the only ones who live on campus.</p>
<p>His apartment complex this year is nicer than any apartment I’ve lived in. He shares it with 3 other boys. They each have their own bedrooms with bathroom & closet. The common area is a livingroom, kitchen, balcony, and laundry room. It is fully furnished. It includes his shuttle bus fees and has tanning beds, a computer lab, a swimming pool, weight room, basketball court, volleyball pit, and a lodge type room with a fireplace and pool tables. The complex has football watch parties on away game days, barbeques, etc. His rent includes most utilities and is the SAME price as his dorm on campus last year.</p>
<p>I know two kids who attend USC and each drives a BMW. And that’s a fact, Jack.</p>
<p>I believe Purdue has a super-premium single occupant room dorm only for some $16,500/yr room and board - and free laundry -. Last I heard they had not fully leased it out…</p>
<p>Solution to problem: don’t go to USC. Go to a certain Catholic school in South Bend, Indiana whose football team is way cooler and way better than USC’s will ever be…:D</p>
<p>GO IRISH!</p>
<p>The bigger issue it that all colleges and universities have been moving toward luxury in the last 20 years, and so it’s no surprise that an outside company decides to take it up a notch. That luxury is not only in housing but in the food courts and rec centers with climbing walls and multiple pools, and check out the architecture on campuses. And let’s not even get into student services – any day now they will bring in the massage therapy center. (And since people on this thread are easily offended, let me just say that massage therapy is wonderful treatment for all kinds of illnesses and problems, including every time I throw out my back.)</p>
<p>Parent1986 So, the Radisson is the only thing surrounding the campus that isn’t a slum? Seriously? The Galen Center is a slum? Exposition Park and the LA Memorial Coliseum are slums? University Gateway and the Shrine Auditorium are slums? USC owned, University Village, and two apartment complexes are slums? </p>
<p>When was the last time you’ve even been near the campus?</p>
<p>Is there crime near campus? Yes, but the crime rate has dropped steadily for the last 20 years. USC has partnered with the LAPD to make the area surrounding the campus safe for students, faculty, staff and other non university affiliated people that live near the campus. </p>
<p>As for the article, I rolled my eyes repeatedly. Yes there are students whose parents are well off that attend USC. And yes the students living in the 1 bedrooms are paying a premium price. However the students living in the 2 and 4 bedroom units that are sharing rooms are paying less than 850 a month which for that area isn’t extremely high and is about the same as the freshman residence halls hence covered by financial aid. I still wouldn’t pay that much for that location, but I imagine it’s pretty popular with students in Fraternities and Sororities that aren’t living in given its close proximity to The Row.</p>
<p>And it’s yet another reason why many of your kids in college these days will leave with 20+ years of nondischargeable student loan debt.</p>
<p>Camomof3, right there with you on this one. My daughter just started USC. She is in an 8 person suite. She shares a small bedroom with another girl. It is a dorm room in every sense. For that we pay around $1000 a month! From what I remember from other colleges she considered, very similar other places. The $680 the articles quotes is NOT “what wealthy people can afford”. Heck, we’d be saving a ton of money and getting a lot more for it!</p>
<p>The omission of that comparison just shows a sloppy journalist eager to write a story with a sensational “class-related” angle. </p>
<p>I echo also another poster who mentioned being bombarded with around- campus private housing options from other schools. The ones we got were for housing around large growing public institutions, not high-tuition private ones. </p>
<p>Finally, just a side note, being new to USC and the college comparison landscape in general, i am just perplexed with people’s need to hate on particular schools. How does anyone have the time or need to actively disparage a school they are not even going to? </p>
<p>We are not rich. My daughter has no car at school. She will be getting a job. She loves USC already including her small bare-bones dorm room and amenity-poor dorm :-). And It is not ghetto around campus (we were told that one too). Thank goodness she judged things for herself rather than listening to all the crap out there, and found a place with the programs and atmosphere she was after.</p>
<p>Reading back my post I realize I got worked up and went somewhat off the main point of this thread :-)</p>
<p>I went and read the whole article. I stand by my reaction that the article has a decided slant. The dorms cost more than those luxury apts, which was conveniently omitted. . If D were to ever get to live in the fancy place , it would not be because she expected to match her parents sumptuous home (ha!) 
Her housing choice will be made based on evaluating the mix of cost, convenience, safety, and value for the money. </p>
<p>If not just usc but also uc riverside and other public schools are offering such options at prices comparable to or lower than dorm fees, then clearly there are more economics at work here than just “housing the spoiled rich kids”. I just really dislike the tone of the article and the partial financial analysis. But that’s just me!</p>
<h1>30</h1>
<h1>22 is a link to a CC thread that further describes the neighborhood. I was last there two years ago. I doubt that the neighborhood has improved much in two years.</h1>
<p>However, I was making my comment tongue in cheek because of the reaction to the luxury apt. being a negative. I thought the reactions to the nice apt. were a little silly. If you read the article and look at the photos, it isn’t that nice.</p>
<p>I realize that everybody has a different definition of a slum.</p>
<p>People,</p>
<p>If you actually read the whole article (it’s not that lengthy), you’ll see that it deals with schools other than USC and with both off-campus apartments and on-campus housing - BOTH are being upgraded to meet the higher housing expectations of kids these days.</p>
<p>Excerpt:</p>
<p>USC and UCLA have made strides in recent years to outgrow their former images as commuter campuses where most students left at the end of the day. Both now draw more students from around the world, some of whom pay tuition of more than $40,000 a year and want housing that meets their refined tastes. Old dormitories are being refurbished and new units that house fewer students are being built to the latest environmental standards.</p>
<p>“Students come on campus tours and want to know where they are going to live all four years; where they will work out, where they will sit with their friends,” said Kristina Raspe, who is in charge of real estate development at USC.</p>
<p>“The cinder block dorms I lived in do not meet current demands,” she adds.</p>
<p>I think the article was very poorly written and confusing. I read it twice (with my glasses on, lol) and I did not see where it makes the distinction that this is about a privately owned and operated residence building, not connected with the school.</p>
<p>Also, if the crappy crowded outdated dorms the school offers are the same cost or more than luxurious digs like the one they described (another fact not clearly presented by the article) then who in their right mind wouldn’t try to get into it??</p>
<p>The schools we looked at were all in the South, Midwest, and Texas, and only one of them (UT) had any issue whatever with a shortage of dormitory space, and all of them had fairly reasonably priced dorm options; in most cases, you can get an apartment with some roomies and come out cheaper than the dorm, but there is that convenience factor and also it is apparently accepted as fact that kids who live on campus at least the first year, do better, which is why all the schools we looked at also required it. But they have enough space that they can.</p>
<p>UT does not require freshmen to live on campus because they only have capacity for about 80 percent of them. There are a lot of those privately owned and run dormitories available. My aunt works as the desk person in one of them. In this instance, the one she works at <em>IS</em> more expensive than the UT housing (which is not especially cheap in the first place) and all the girls (it is an all girl dorm) who live there do happen to be from very wealthy families. </p>
<p>Kids who cannot afford these places who don’t live on campus often seek out less pricey private options such as co-op dorms.</p>
<p>Of the many schools we toured, I think every single one of them was either adding or upgrading their housing. We were touring just before the economy really crashed and enrollment at every school was still up. (maybe it is still up right now - I stopped paying attention after she signed on the dotted line last spring, haha.)</p>
<p>My daughter’s dorm at the private college she is attending is insanely cheap, apparently. She is in the least expensive and oldest one but it is plenty nice, certainly nicer than the one I went to. It’s 80 years old but has been updated and upgraded and has everything they need, including wifi and cable, and is in very nice condition. It costs 2095 a semester. The most expensive option is the on campus upper classman apartments and they are 4,200 a semester. The newer traditional dorms run in the mid 3000’s a semester.</p>
<p>Apparently that is a bargain compared to some schools. She was considering two other schools that were very similar, academically, to this school, but the total COA at the others was several thousand more, and we got a few thousand more in aid from this one, and the result was that we could swing this one without her taking loans.</p>
<p>Since the academics and everything else about it were at least as pleasing to her as the others- she took it. </p>
<p>I guess the schools with much more expensive dorms filled all their slots too…competition for price doesn’t seem to come into play with schools.</p>
<p>I’m just really grateful her school has figured out a way to keep the housing costs fairly reasonable with no loss of quality.</p>
<p>Back in the Olden Times, when I was in school, housing cost more than tuition. But full time tuition and fees was 350 dollars at my state flagship school. Shocking.</p>
<p>Yep, we’re also guilty of the Multi million dollar on campus Rec Center. It does have a rock climbing wall AND a spa. Yes, it’s part of what drew us to this particular college. They also have top notch labs and classroom opportunities. That money spills over into every aspect. For us, it is expensive, but not nearly as much as some others.</p>
<p>
This statement from the article isn’t right either. Neither of those campuses would be considered a commuter campus by any stretch. There are some commuters at each campus but there are so many students who live on or adjacent to the campus that they wouldn’t be categorized as commuter campuses. Has anyone here ever considered either a commuter campus?</p>
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<p>I know nothing about these colleges, but the article was very clever in saying, “former images of commuter campus”? See, the ‘former’ part means that they could be talking about any point in time since the date each university first opened. The ‘image’ thing suggests that, while they might not actually be ‘consumer campuses’, some people used to think so. “Some people” could be anyone; alumni, current students, the surrounding community, people across the country who are only considering these campuses, college rankers, the writer’s children, the old man who lives down the street… I’m sure at least one person somewhere has said something like that, once. </p>
<p>It’s kind of weaselly, but it’s really common in articles where the writer either isn’t sure what s/he’s talking about or is trying to create a ‘false trend’ (take two or three items in a narrow, unrepresentative sample and extrapolate them into a statement about thousands of other items in the population). </p>
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<p>Yeah, it’s kind of tricky. I think it was written for people who live near these colleges and would recognize the locations by street name. Certainly, I couldn’t tell if they were talking about a dorm, an apartment run by the university, or an apartment run by a separate enterprise working with the university, or something else entirely. For example:</p>
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</p>
<p>Is Camino del Sol run by the university? It says ‘on campus’ but it could easily be operated by a private company. The University Gateway is described as being almost like a luxury hotel ‘just outside USC’, which suggests off-campus, but is it an off-campus apartment run by the university or not? Is it really fair to blame USC or UCLA for someone else’s marketing strategy? </p>
<p>I’m sure it’s a lovely article if you live in Los Angeles but I’m an East Coaster so all of these references are oddly vague.</p>
<p>^^and why it was posted in the parents forum in the first place is beyond me. It was a[ poorly written] article in the LA Times, which does not have the reputation of being a beacon of wisdom…
It is old news that some colleges, and peripheral corporations that cater to rich college students, have been building ritzy new housing, climbing walls, rec centers, all in the effort to attract students.</p>
<p>I guess this newby writer needed to write about something…</p>