Texas Tech (state school) has both a climbing wall and Lazy river both on school property for the students. Tech is isolated in West Texas is not a commuter school. They are working hard to provide amenities to the students and their growth shows it is working.
UNT also has a lazy river. At least one off campus apartment complex in my city has one. There isn’t one on campus but they are renovating the rec center currently. Maybe there’s one In the works.
I’ve seen lots of climbing walls. But the public park in my neighborhood has a climbing wall. Those really aren’t a rare luxury.
Climbing walls have gotten more popular in general in the last coukd of decades. So I think they become one of those “kids these days” things just because of that.
I worked in the cafeteria where the football and basketball teams ate at my college. Massive amounts of food were eaten. I still remember some would get a tray of just drinks, like 8 glasses of milk and 4 of orange juice, just for one guy. I very much doubt that any girl would ever eat like that, and certainly not daily. Poster above was pointing out that, on average, one would think that if you are preparing the average amount of food a female eats compared to the average amount a guy eats, you should be able to do it cheaper for an all female group. In milk alone you might save thousands!
I grew up with 4 brothers. They ate more than my sister and me. Much more. They ate cereal out of a mixing bowl and drank gallons of milk. At one point my youngest brother and his friend lived with me when I was in grad school. Every Sunday I make a chicken and when it was just me and my brother, we had left overs for at least 2 meals. When his friend moved in, the chicken was picked clean and they were looking for more food and hour later.
D’s school allows micro-fridges (tiny fridge with attached microwave) from the one approved vendor (I’ve seen this vendor listed at other schools too, seems like they have a lock on the market).
Anyway, you wouldn’t think of a microwave as a fire hazard but one of D’s roommates did manage to start a fire! Yup, dorm got evacuated, fire trucks were called, the whole nine yards. All of D’s clothes smelled like smoke afterwards. Dumb roommate didn’t even proactively replace the fridge, D and the other roommates had to harrass her into getting it replaced.
My kids went to a high school with a $40M athletic complex, including a $10M swimming pool. They do exist.
Of course it doesn’t apply to all individual cases. But I believe the point was an all-women’s college should have a lower per-capita cost of materials for food than a mixed-gender college. I don’t think anyone can argue against that point on the facts.
Cost of service remains the same though, so the overall savings is probably much less than the average person would expect. In a restaurant cost of goods is usually in the 30% range, for cafeteria food I’d expect must lower, like 20%. So if I do some bad math in my head, you might expect the women’s college to spend about $.05 less per dollar than the mixed-gender college on the total meal plan.
On average, adolescent/young adult males as a group tend to eat greater quantities of food at each meal than their female counterparts due to factors such as having growth spurts in late teen/early young adult years* and far greater social acceptability of young males eating large quantities of food.
Regarding the latter, it also sometimes prompted parents and older relatives/adults and male peers to encourage boys/young men to eat more if they felt the amount of food consumed in a given meal was unusually small. That was my experience after having my massive growth spurt from 5’2" to 5’7" over one summer between sophomore and junior year of HS(~14-15).
It was only reinforced when I experienced a “reversed freshman 15” by losing ~15 pounds by the end of freshman year in college despite EATING MORE food because I was also much more physically active from taking long walks and involving myself in more pick up soccer/volleyball games with classmates or friends/relatives on breaks.
And the quantities of food consumed by bona-fide college athletes or those who are just as physically active are something else.
A relative who attended a FSA recounted his academy reserved special “athlete tables” for academy athletes and cadets academy officials deemed severely underweight for their height. Vast majority of those athletes and underweight cadets were male.
- Some young men continue to grow taller well into their early-mid-20s whereas most women's growth stop sometime by late middle school/early HS(~12-15).
Even when growth stops, men tend to need more calories than women.
I am not willing to pay extra for my kid’s living arrangement to have a lazy river, etc. But I will gladly pay a little extra for a private bedroom. I paid extra for a “single” dorm room when I was in college and nearly broke. It was very much worth it to have my own space, and not be woken by someone else’s comings and goings, and not worry that my own late-night studying was impacting someone else. I am glad to see the trend toward suite-style dorms.
I’d think the savings for communal meals at a girls school (like Smith and how meals were explained to us when we toured) would not cost so much because they are girls eating but because there wouldn’t be as much waste as with the cafeteria style ‘all you can eat’ plans. My daughter’s meals at her sorority are much cheaper than the school’s meal plans. Breakfast and lunch at her house are sort of on their own (I think some foods are set out and they make sandwiches or microwave mac and cheese) but dinner is served family style. One main choice, they sign out if they aren’t going to be there so there is less food prepared. No one is standing by the Mongolian grill or at the carving station like at the cafeteria just waiting to seve you. One or two cooks, some frat boys as servers, not a lot of wasted food (leftovers are lunch the next day).