<p>I just read yesterday that the cost of college has gone up by 539% in the last 25 years. Yikes. </p>
<p>Dorm living is a rip-off. You could rent a nice apartment for what you pay for your tiny room, at least in my state.</p>
<p>It is a rip-off…unless you get a sweet discounted deal. 
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<p>In my university’s area for what you pay monthly for dorms, you could get you a “nice” apartment (which many students settle for), but I’m not for “roughin’” it. I’ll wait until my time is up and get a nice place in a good area. </p>
<p>That means garage parking (ideal:connected), lamanate wood flooring/carpet, dark wood cabinets, countertops that aren’t laminate or tile (ideal:granite), secure apartment complex in a fairly safe section of town, and yada yada yada. $500 a month can’t get me that.</p>
<p>Niquii77: Where we both live, 500/month gets you the parking space. Pitch a tent in the space & run an extension cord for the heater/ hot plate & charger for the laptop & iPhone</p>
<p>At my son’s LAC there was only one price for housing so that both rich and poor students had the same options. Similarly, there was only one charge for meal plans.</p>
<p>My two kids are going to very different schools next year. D1’s cost for room and board (selecting the least expensive 12 meal/week option) will be about $8000. D2’s estimate for R&B is about $13.2k! We’ll get that down by $2000 by selecting the traditional dorm with a shared bath rather than the 4-to-a-suite dorms, where 4 share 2 baths and a kitchenette. I don’t get the kitchenette as all dorm students are required to select the meal plan, of which there is exactly one option - full price, so I don’t really understand why they built these luxury dorms at all. The coach (my daughter has an athletic scholarship) wants all the girls to room near each other, and was leaning to the expensive dorms, but I think enough parents have said ‘whoa, lets save the $2k and go for the traditional dorms’ so that’s what we’re looking at. I also don’t think most kids eat 21 meals per week in the dining halls, so I’m glad D1’s school offers different plans.</p>
<p>Here is Temple bragging about their luxury dorm</p>
<p>[New</a> luxury dorms at Temple among country’s most expensive » Metro.us](<a href=“http://www.metro.us/philadelphia/news/local/2013/01/29/new-luxury-dorms-at-temple-among-countrys-most-expensive/]New”>http://www.metro.us/philadelphia/news/local/2013/01/29/new-luxury-dorms-at-temple-among-countrys-most-expensive/)</p>
<p>My view is that they should reduce the state appropriation for the school by half the cost of the dormitory. Maybe then the administration of the school would get the message.</p>
<p>And possibly lose some students to schools with better dorms. These are not built in a vacuum. Response to demand/competition from private dorms.</p>
<p>I think a lot of students have better accommodations at home than many of us did years ago. For instance, I left an 11x11 room shared with 2 sisters (one of whom wore diapers and cried at night) for a 12x16 room with just one roommate who hadn’t worn diapers in years and rarely cried. Serious upgrade. And I shared a hall bath with 19 other people, but there were 5 toilets and 3 showers. That was better than sharing 1 toilet and 1 shower with 7 other people. For me and many of the girls in my dorm, living in a small dorm room with a roomie and sharing a hall bath wasn’t at all a big deal - it was what we were used to. My D, on the other hand, has never shared a bedroom in her life and was used to having her own bathroom. None of her friends from HS shared a room, either, whether due to larger home sizes, smaller family sizes or both. D chose a dorm with suite-style living, with single bedrooms and bathrooms shared by 2 people. She’s adjusted well and likes the setup. I’m sure she could have adjusted to a traditional dorm setup, but with all the other adjustments to be made during freshman year, and the availability of an alternative, I was happy to spring for the nicer dorm. I have several friends with kids who had a lot of roommate problems when they went to college, and I wonder if it isn’t because they’d never had to share space before, making for a difficult adjustment.</p>
<p>“And possibly lose some students to schools with better dorms. These are not built in a vacuum.”</p>
<p>Oh, well. As the saying goes, life is a dog of undetermined gender and then you die.</p>
<p>Temple used to be sort of the CUNY of Philadelphia–a place where working class people would go as part of an effort to gain upward mobility. It has become increasingly clear that that mission is not cool enough for them, so they are now trying to attract your typical affluent suburban white kid. A few they attract with merit money, but in many cases they are simply kids whose stats are not good enough to get to the main campus at Penn State. Who needs another school that uses that model? Let’em go somewhere else.</p>
<p>The point is to create financial incentives to return to the older model. I think that the message should be sent loud and clear–do your best to keep costs down and provide a relatively low cost university education, or we will spend the public money somewhere else (my first choice would be to divert it to the Philadelphia public school system, which is in a desperate finance situation, but I know that is never going to happen). </p>
<p>Of course, if they think that by having luxury dorms they can attract a sufficient number mediocre suburban students to make up for the loss of $100 million dollars in revenue, let’em try.</p>
<p>Temple is making big changes. This fall the first guaranteed merit (Alabama style, even a bit more generous in some cases) students will arrive. The new dorms are, I suspect, part of the push to make Temple feel more like a real campus and less like a commuter school in a less popular part of the city.</p>
<p>The new merit will not, I don’t think, pull in mediocre suburban kids. I think the goal is to steal high achieving out of state kids and retain in state kids who have much higher ranked options.</p>
<h2>D spent a week in the “regular” frosh dorms last summer and they were, IMO, quite nice.</h2>
<p>Sorry cross posted with EMM. IDK if it is a good thing that Temple is doing or not. It seems like every state has a somewhat expensive but lots of merit school, in my state it’s Miami.</p>
<p>According to that article $5 million was donated specifically for that dorm. I guess the bet is that bringing more students on-campus will bring in more $ for the school in the long run.</p>
<p><a href=“http://hiddencityphila.org/2013/08/with-morgan-hall-temple-ushers-in-new-era/[/url]”>http://hiddencityphila.org/2013/08/with-morgan-hall-temple-ushers-in-new-era/</a></p>
<p>You are conflating two issues. Yes all PA publics have sever funding issues. You can use multiple methods to address that including attracting OOS and higher income students that are as mediocre as Temple students have been over the years if they help keep the place afloat that’s a good thing. Making Temple a worse school mostly for the poor helps nobody.</p>
<p>I don’t believe that I am conflating the issues at all. The whole point of having luxury dormitories is to attract a group of students who are greatly concerned with living in comfort–i.e., affluent white students. But by spending a lot more money on dormitories, you inevitably drive the cost of education up for all students, and those cost increases have the greatest impact on poor and working class students generally.</p>
<p>Now, if they want to follow that model, that’s fine. But if they do, I’m going to spend my public funds elsewhere–for example, on a place like CCP,which does primarily serve the poor and working class community in Philadelphia.</p>
<p>I think there’s something to be said for living in a boxy, no-frills, room with a roommate, on a hall your first year, sharing a bath</p>
<p>I agree…but (and this will probably get some screams), kids are more spoiled these days and are used to having their own rooms, and having no one touch their stuff. Plus, the “stuff” that kids have these days consists of pricey laptops, cell phones, etc…and to risk theft or breakage from a roomie or “roomie’s questionable friends” can be an issue.</p>
<p>Most dorms at publics are priced to amortize their costs over the life of the debt used to build them. . So your argument is bogus as it has no impact on costs for others.</p>
<p>I think it’s a tough call. Temple still very significantly serves the poor and working class community in Philadelphia. As of 20 years ago, it may well have had the worst neighborhood location of any university anywhere near its size in the U.S. The Temple campus was a scary place . . . much less anywhere that was half a block off campus.</p>
<p>Forget white suburban students; Temple was not going to be able to continue to attract poor and working class students if it couldn’t stop looking like a location for The Wire. People talk about how dangerous Penn’s campus is, or USC, or Columbia, the University of Chicago, but compared to Temple every one of those campuses might just as well be in La Jolla. Fordham may be in the ballpark, but if it’s in the ballpark it’s a luxury box, and Temple is the concourse behind the right field bleachers. Temple has devoted enormous resources, first to securing its campus – you can get a tan at midnight from the klieg lights – then to improving the neighborhood, and finally to upgrading its facilities. It’s still far from perfect – there is still plenty of street crime around the campus – but it is finally attracting students who DO have other choices.</p>
<p>As for students who couldn’t get into Penn State Main Campus – most of my kids’ high school classmates affirmatively preferred Temple or Pitt to Penn State, and I am talking about kids for whom Penn State was a safety school. If you are used to living in a big city and taking public transportation to do big city things, Penn State is Nowheresville. If you are worried about being too far from your family, Penn State is too far from your family. </p>
<p>In securing and improving its neighborhood, part of the strategy has been to get more businesses and amenities to operate there, and part is to keep students on campus or near campus to patronize those businesses. The two go hand in hand, and you can’t sustain either without the other. And, by and large, Temple has done a pretty good job of managing this.</p>
<p>One of the things it has done, like other universities, is to work with private developers and community groups. The new dorm has been developed by a partnership between a private developer known for public-minded projects and Bright Hope Baptist Church, one of the two or three strongest churches in the African-American community in Philadelphia. It is replacing an elementary school that was shuttered more than eight years ago. It’s really pretty great news for the city in general, and for Temple in particular.</p>
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<p>We don’t even live in PA and D would definitely prefer Pitt or Temple to PSU. Individual college programs aside, Pitt is in Pitt and Temple is in Philly and PSU is in…a town named because it is there. </p>
<p>If there is a lot of money being spent on dorms at Temple and the students who will come and choose to pay more for those dorms, I don’t see how that adversely affects a commuter student.</p>
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<li><p>With respect to to the choice between Penn State main and Temple, I can only say that the experience of my suburban Philly school district is quite different from that of JHS. BTW, I should make it clear that I don’t have a dog in that particular fight; all of my children went elsewhere.</p></li>
<li><p>In the case of Temple, it’s not just the dorm (although I continue to believe that a dorm like that is an abomination at any public university). Consider, for example, their newly-minted presidential scholarship, which is clearly designed to attract high achieving (read: affluent suburban white) students and have their education subsidized by everyone else at the school. And yes, I am generally opposed in principle to merit scholarships at public universities generally, even though one of my kids got one.</p></li>
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<p>I take your point on the form though I don’t see a problem with the option since it’s, well, optional and costs are covered by those who choose to live there. </p>
<p>I will say that my non-affluent non-suburban family is considering Temple because of that newly minted scholarship (and the fact that it is in Philly with all the public transportation and internship and other opportunities that come with that). </p>
<p>Does attracting high stats kids harm the school’s less high achieving students? Maybe, but an argument can certainly be made that those students may enhance the academic environment there and also may turn out to be large donors in the future. </p>
<p>A high achieving full Pell student (and that student isn’t expected to be a water polo champ or have had the opportunity to join model UN or Intel competitions or whatever as may be most helpful in attracting full need-based aid from a prominent private) can be a residential student at Temple for something like $5K a year with that scholarship and Pell, and more or less for free with sub Stafford loans.</p>
<p>I wish your child all the luck in the world, and if he/she is being offered the presidential scholarship I am sure he has earned. But I am particularly opposed to state universities giving merit money to out of state students.</p>
<p>You must be opposed to many state universities then!</p>