Outrageous room & board!?

College Search & Selection
1

<p>UNE is a good school with reasonable tuition and I checked the room and board, and it's around five THOUSAND dollars a SEMESTER. ...Does that sound like too much to anybody else?!</p>

2

<p>Bowdoin College is about the same.</p>

3

<p>Check out UCBerkeley:</p>

<p><a href="http://www.housing.berkeley.edu/livingatcal/rates.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.housing.berkeley.edu/livingatcal/rates.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>:)</p>

4

<p>that actually sounds pretty reasonable/a good deal.</p>

5

<p>damn that's some expensive stuff</p>

<p>why is berkeley's rooming so expensive??? that's like 15k a year for single room housing...</p>

6

<p>Yeah, that seems about par.</p>

7

<p>Berkeley's housing is expensive because of CA real estate prices, don't you think? They know that students won't be able to go elsewhere for any less. Also, demand for on-campus housing is high.</p>

8

<p>Pay more than that for r & b at CWRU. R & B is outrageous IMO, it is what colleges make a killing on. My S' meal plan is one meal a day. It costs $10/day. I seriously doubt S regularly eats $10/day. It is a ripoff.</p>

9

<p>The cost of living in Berkeley is a bit high, too. The city has a density of about 9.8k/sq mile vs. the 8.2k/sq mile for LA. And if you look at the price of Berkeley and UCLA housing, you'd see $13,848 and $12,420. (I also have a feeling that Berkeley makes up for its very low tuition in its "housing" costs.)</p>

<p>Look at privates:</p>

<p>Stanford: $10,808
Harvard: $10,622
Princeton: $10,980
Yale: $10,470
Dartmouth: $10,305</p>

10

<p>That's why one should always compare total cost of attendance (and NET cost of attendance, in the usual situation when the student is offered some financial aid) to total overall benefits of attending before deciding where to attend. Apply widely and compare offers after being admitted and getting whatever financial aid offers you get.</p>

11

<p>At Northeastern, if you have a standard double and want 19 meals per week it will cost you $11,420.</p>

12

<p>If you think of the meals as being akin to "amusement park" or "stadium concessions" then the pricing is quite reasonable. They've got a captive audience -- people who are unwilling or unable to find food options away from the academic/residential core -- so there's no competition. If the dining services were being run by Walt Disney Co. or your regional stadium authority, you'd look at your college meal plans and marvel at their generosity, right? Since there's no changing it, convince yourself to appreciate it: "A hot meal for my son costs less than a pretzel and large coke would cost at Six Flags Over Academia." Yeah, just tell yourself that and you'll get over the outrage.</p>