I have to tell you, if a private company offered better accommodations for only $49 a month, I’d be tempted. And if a private company builds and operates the apartment complex, the university’s not paying for it. I can’t figure out if the rental contracts are month-to-month or yearly.
Many students stay in their college towns in the summer, to work or do internships. It would be convenient to skip the ritual of moving in and out of student dorm rooms and summer temporary housing.
I don’t have a problem with people choosing to spend $49 a month more for housing they like better. I don’t find that extravagant, and in point of fact, taxpayers are not footing the bill. Sure, some students may be paying the rent with student loans. However, universities avoid building new residence halls financed with bonds, when private companies offer comparable (or better) housing nearby for comparable prices.
I would ask, though, if a private company can make a profit offering better apartments at comparable rates, is it possible that university rental rates are too high?
“And it is not necessarily to attract high achieving students in general. Rather it is intended to attract wealthy full pay students used to living in luxury. Appealing to those students in this way is jacking up costs.”
@lostaccount – well, someone has to pay! And my state ranks 48th-49th in per-student-spending on the college level. Voters keep electing anti-tax, anti-higher-ed representatives. If it weren’t for the OOS students I shudder to think what the schools here would be like…
And it’s not just my state – as state funding for higher ed decreases nationwide, you will see higher costs, and greater spending to attract OOS/wealthy students everywhere. State taxes account for so little in most schools’ budgets that pretty soon being a resident won’t matter much at all.
We can pay (much) higher state taxes and have affordable state schools – or we can resist taxes and have expensive, OOS-student oriented campuses. We get to pick. And voters nationwide have picked. The results speak for themselves.
“I would ask, though, if a private company can make a profit offering better apartments at comparable rates, is it possible that university rental rates are too high?”
THIS.
720 dollars is pretty much exactly what a student in the European country I live in is entitled to as a monthly allowance - as maintenance from their parents until they have finished their first degree, or, if the parents are low income or refuse to pay, as federal aid, usually in a grant/loan combination. Room, board, travel, books, fun. If you want to study in the most expensive metropolitan areas, find subsidized student housing, work more, downsize, share or commute. It’s very hard to turn a profit on students at this rate.
The question is not whether students live in luxury but whether the pricing is luxury - after all, they are a captive market!
I’m thinking complaints like these are focused on extreme examples like High Point U which has been cited in some older threads as an example of a college with dining halls and dorms which resemble luxurious hotel/resort living.
Another could be derived from mass media portrayals like a television documentary on higher education 2+ decades ago where some of the undergrad dorms GWU were converted from luxury homes/hotels and some older critics felt offering such amenities for undergrads may not prepare them well for post-college life as few will have the incomes necessary to have such accommodations in their first apartments unless they continued to be subsidized by well-off parents or a trust fund.
Part of this might also be based on one’s perspective/generation as older generations who attended college…especially public colleges without student centers filled with well-known restaurant/coffee shop chains may view a student campus with well known fastfood chains as 'luxurious frills".
It could also be a matter of perspective depending on what one’s used to from one’s formative years. For instance, I felt my dorm accommodations was fine and far better than what I expected from seeing photos of dorms from photos of older relatives and HS classmates’ parents’ dorms back in the 50’s and '60s…especially those who attended no-frills public colleges back in the day*.
In contrast, some classmates from upper/upper-middle class SES backgrounds felt the same dorm was “spartan” or “needed renovations**”.
Talking American universities here. The dorms in China/Taiwan were far less luxurious in terms of amenities and even space considering the standard dorm accommodation for ALL on-campus students was cramming 6-8 students and their possessions into a room the size of a small American double-room. Beds are organized as 2 bunk beds on each side of the room with ONE long table for all of them.
The ones in Mainland China even into the end of the '90s also had a deliberate policy of cutting off electricity during the day to encourage students to not stay in their rooms outside of class(studying was commonly done in libraries or empty classroom buildings, not in the dormroom)
** For decorative/aesthetic reasons, not due to lack of the basics such as deteriorating fixtures, furniture, or peeling paint on the walls. Some ended up having an even more severe reality check when they found their first apartments in popular expensive urban areas such as Boston or NYC for which they were paying a premium for were even more spartan and sometimes lacking even in the basics.
It didn’t occur to me to waste film taking a picture of my college dorm in the 80’s (nevermind the 50s and 60s). Now my own kids, sure, hey just snap a phone pic, or 10.
The dorm D12 lived in her 1st year was the same one I lived my 1st semester. There had been no renovations in the nearly 30 years between those 2 points.
For the multi-generationed American parents of HS classmates, the photos taken of their dorm was due to the fact they were the first ones in their family to attend residential colleges/college period and they wanted a way to show the rest of the extended family and close neighbors in their neighborhoods/communities. .
With my extended relatives, the photos were due to the novelty of attending a US college with dorms much more spacious and appointed than what they’d have had back in China/Taiwan.
It’s a similar reason to how some American classmates studying abroad in China were snapping pictures of dorms of their Chinese student hosts as they were far more cramped/spartan than most American dormrooms or the accommodations given to us study-abroad students or other internationals or how some aunts/great-aunts took several pictures of the FSA campus areas on parent’s weekend while my cousins were cadets there.
If your “friends” actually have those pictures, I’m sure the universities would love copies. It’s hard for unis to collect images of the dorms from those time periods because very few students took pictures that weren’t staged/formal pictures.
The lack of renovation is part of the problem. Stop maintaining a building and it will turn into a ruin within a decade, less if you’re on a climate challenged region I see it on academic buildings as well as residence halls. This reduces available revenue - or provides plenty of opportunity for the upsell.
The other is exorbitant meal plan / room rates. DD18 got a full ride at a flagship OOS and into their very desirable honors college as well. The honors dorm plus honors meal plan represents a spectacular expense ($6k for 9 months worth of food? what cruise line is this?).
At daughter’s school the freshmen are required to take the full meal plan at about $6000/yr. Surprisingly, sophomores eat much less at about $3400/yr. Or is it just that the school figured out too many sophomores were moving off campus because it is about half the cost? Hmm. Could that be it? My daughter is a sophomore who stayed on campus and uses an entirely flex meal plan. She usually buys food at the little grocery store (which is still very overpriced) with her flex points and still has some left over.
Her boyfriend has a ‘lunch M-F’ plan where he can eat as many times as he wants between 10:30 and 3, so he eats breakfast at 10:30 and then lunch before 3. He gets his money’s worth.
There are several choices for housing, with the cheapest being a traditional double dorm room with a shared hall bath at about $2200/semester and the most expensive being a one bedroom apt type with a kitchenette (still have to get a meal plan) at almost $5000/sem. There is definitely more housing available at the higher end, most being about $4000/sem They don’t even show the traditional dorm doubles on the tours as most freshmen live in the suite style freshman village. All new building is suite style, no more traditional dorms.
Back in the '90s, my friends at different colleges and I calculated how much the mandated meal plans on a per meal basis.
Ranges were from a low of $6 per meal to a high of $10 per meal. We all found if we had the money as a lump sum rather than applied towards the meal plan, we’d still have money left over even if we ate out at reasonably decent restaurants for most/all of our meals. This included students whose colleges were located in/around expensive urban areas.
Buying groceries and cooking/making simple meals for ourselves would have only increased the amount of money left over…especially if one takes good advantage of coupons and sales.
My kids lived on campus and had meal plans all 4 years. That’s how we wanted it. They had the rest of their lives to have to cook for themselves as they now do in their own apartments. I think it’s a waste of time for undergrads to shop and cook. I’d rather they have a cafeteria where they can just go get food and socialize and be around others instead of being hermits cooking and eating on their own. That’s part of college to H and me, that you eat communally in a cafeteria or setting with others, not hole up in an apartment or dorm room with your food. My D has celiac so she did shop for some supplemental snacks so she could have gluten-free granola bars and so forth to take with her so she wasn’t caught unprepared. But it was time consuming as the nearest grocery store was a distance away and she had no car. But otherwise? What a complete waste of time IMO.
PG–“not hole up in an apartment or dorm room with your food”–Most dorm cooking is not done “holed up in your room” it can be a very social activity. And learning how to shop and take care of yourself including managing your money is hardly a time waster. Scheduling your day around hours of a cafeteria while spending at least twice what you need to for food is both time and money wasting.
Meal plans are a money maker for the college which is why they are required for some freshman students–it’s like tacked on tuition.
I agree that meal plan rates nowadays are exorbitant, but - also agree with pizzagirl that dining together as a community, in the cafeteria, is enriching to the whole residential college experience.
I simply disagree, gouf. My kids’ dorms either didn’t have kitchens at all (why would they?? It’s a dorm! I never had kitchens in a dorm) or if they did, they were sad little grungy places with cruddy ovens, fridges and a microwave and no real place to sit. There was no comparison to the experience of going to a cafeteria where you have tons of choices laid out for you and you can sit with old friends or branch out and find new friends. I think the socialization aspect is worth every penny. Food isn’t just about nourishment, otherwise they’d eat granola bars in their rooms. It’s about socialization.
I also don’t see how shopping " needs" to be taught. My kids stayed on campus some summers without meal plans and picked it up. I hate where we have to pretend that mundane household chores are so complex they need “teaching.” It’s kind of like the laundry thing - who cares if a kid did laundry or not in high school, they can learn all they need to know in a 5 min lesson before heading off to college. This isn’t the olden days where we are cutting off the heads of our own chickens or carrying water from the well to wash clothing.
The dining together as a community is an ideal which isn’t always fully met even with mandated meal plans for a variety of reasons such as:
Scheduling conflicts between dining hall hours and classes/co-curricular activities. I’ve had a few required classes which overlapped with lunch. Some other classmates’ schedules meant they missed two meals.
Multiple dining options. It’s hard to live up to the ideal of “dining as a community” if one has multiple dining options on one’s meal plan whether it’s multiple dining halls, a la carte options, dining co-ops, etc.
And that’s not taking into account fraternities/sorority organizations which take their means in their respective houses which is only open to members and their guests. Sometimes those fraternity houses may not even be located close to campus as was the case with some I know of at some Boston area colleges such as MIT. In the latter case, it’s almost like they’re living off-campus…
Some teens/young adults do need to be taught some of those mundane household chores or they could end up like some undergrads at friends’ dorms who ruined their clothes(E.g. white shirts turning pink or blue).
I also know of some older college classmates and adults well into their late 30s and older who still don’t know how to do simple chores like replacing light bulbs and the embarrassment from reactions of past roommates/SOs meant they have become increasingly resistant to learning.
I know for at least one of my kids, if you had classes conflicting with lunch hours, they would pack you a lunch to go. I think that’s a terrific idea and I’m glad they did it.
As for dining as a community, I think that the flexibility to eat at any hall on campus (versus just the one you are assigned to) gives GREATER community. Now you can continue that conversation with the friend you just met in history class over lunch in her cafeteria, versus in my day when you could only eat in your home dorm.
As for Greek houses, it’s still providing community. There were 45 girls living in my house so there was always someone new to eat with at each meal, even if your closest friends weren’t there at the moment. It’s still socialization, versus living in an apartment.
Sorry. Other people can do what they like, but I see zero advantage to cooking for oneself in college versus a cafeteria.