<p>My son loves the "cinderblock dorm" because it is so social -- open doors, friendly kids.</p>
<p>$13,000 a year for a suite in the dorms?! Good GOD man, WHY? Even if you're year round, that's like $1100/month, which is like manhattan apartment prices - and pretty decent manhattan apartments at that!</p>
<p>You can easily get a nice room in a house at the top of the hill in El Cerrito (say) for $450/month. For the difference in prices, you could:</p>
<ul>
<li>hire a limousine to take you and your friends back and forth to campus</li>
<li>rent the WHOLE HOUSE rather than just a room, if you felt like it</li>
<li>pay a ton of tuition that probably isn't fully comped</li>
<li>have a high-class hooker once a week, or a less classy one twice a week</li>
</ul>
<p>I mean let's be real here, that's an enormous amount of money for a dorm. Even here in new york at columbia, the students only end up paying $600-700/month (equivalently - about $3k, 3300 per semester) for a good dorm room.</p>
<p>I live in a dorm built in 1959, nearly all double rooms about 11'x12' each. Cinderblock, etc. We do have a huge window in our room which is pretty cool. Stackable furniture so it was really easy to loft (I can stand up under my bed) Cable tv, ethernet, etc.</p>
<p>We do have community bathrooms...but I'll say right now that I LOVE the community bathrooms. My hall has 60 guys and there usually aren't more than 3-4 people in the bathroom at a time due to the different schedules of everyone. Did I mention that the community bathrooms are sweet? A shared bathroom with three other kids would get gross pretty quick, and you know that nobody is going to clean it.</p>
<p>What is the average cost of an average dorm room? Mine works out to be about $875/month, but that includes food.</p>
<p>For my son the room alone is about $500/mo. And in his area, for $1000/mo (what college is getting on the double room) he could easily rent a very nice 2 Br apt. for $700-$800/mo. leaving the other 2-3 hundred to cover utilities. That is why as soon as he can move off campus, he will.</p>
<p>Reading that makes me want to gag. Honestly.</p>
<p>"The article says the fancy dorms at DePaul are in line with students' views of what it is to be a grown up. Too bad they are not paying for it themselves, as they would have to do if truly grown up (oh, but then they might actually have to WAIT until they can actually afford it --- if ever). I sure hope these pampered princes & princesses get 6-figure jobs right out of college & have no big loans to pay off --- otherwise, they are in for a very rude awakening. Of course, they may just join the legions of people who live lives they cannot afford, maxing out credit cards. Or ... Mom & Dad will just continue to open their wallets & give, give, give."</p>
<p>I agree. I have no problem with schools updating their dorms, but they should not be providing ridiculous amenities that these kids will not be able to afford right away when they graduate. What next? -- massages, pedicures?</p>
<p>Also, the article makes a good point that many kids are just borrowing more money so as to afford these plusher dorms. Ridiculous! It's one thing if these kids were "trust fund babies" and no one is going to miss the money, but who wants to be paying back loans for 10 years when they were spent so frivolously!</p>
<p>Good dorms are awesome. Once again, it seems like a case of bitter parent syndrome.</p>
<p>Taking a limousine to school makes you a douchebag in my book.</p>
<p>ZING.! Idk if the guy does that every day though...it might've been just to hype up CNN's story.</p>
<p>I definitely see limos all the time on campus though...so it might be a possibility. And anyone who does use one to get to class everyday needs to get off their sorry ass and stop relying on daddy and mommy's money.</p>
<p>Although a good, posh dorm room is well worth it, I think having a mediocre one makes going home all the more worthwhile.</p>
<p>As for my own freshman dorm experience, we always hung around the common area, and you get more of a sense of that "community feel." One of the other freshman dorms at Georgetown is equipped with a private bathroom, and those dorms don't feel as social.</p>
<p>Now that we live in a campus apartment, however... different story.</p>
<p>Poshness sounds a LOT like conspicuous consumption, especially when you're using a limo to get anywhere! I still find it extremely indulgent that they have laundry services so the poor college kids don't have to wash their own dirty clothes.
Community bathrooms & common areas do create more cohesiveness, in my mind. That to me was one of the most cherished parts of the college/grad school experience.
Believe this trend of increasing "poshness" is driving up the already very high cost of college & it seems wasteful & extravagant to me & increases the "sense of entitlement" that many younger folks already have. <sigh> OK, I'm off the soapbox.</sigh></p>
<p>Just a laundry comment:</p>
<p>I am one of those students who takes my laundry to a wash/dry/fold place. Why? because between taking 19 semester hours, the equestrian team, doing homework for a biomolecular chemistry degree, and trying to find time to sleep and occasionally see my friends- I don't have time to go down to the communal washers, find out that there are none available, wait for someone who has left their clothes to come get them, load them up, sit there while they wash and dry (because if you leave your clothes unattended here for 10 seconds after the wash ends, someone will unload them, and usually claim anything brand name for their own) and then go fold them and put them away. Instead, I pay a little extra and buy myself some extra time to get things done that I would really like to be doing, like having lunch with a friend that I normally just wouldn't have time for.</p>
<p>I do my own laundry at home and when I have time here at school, but when you're looking at two hours to wash a pile of dirty clothes versus the mountain of homework you need to catch up on, sending them out and wasting the money seems like a better choice, at least to me.</p>
<p>"Good dorms are awesome. Once again, it seems like a case of bitter parent syndrome."</p>
<p>No, it's a case of realistic parent syndrome.</p>
<p>Mount Union's dorms were like going to prison. Okay, so I've never been to prison, but I'm a huge fan of true crime novels and stories so I've heard about what it's like. (And by true crime, I don't mean CSI or the TV shows--you CANNOT solve a cold case in an hour; go to websleuths.com if you want to read up on some good stuff, the Sharon Marshall case has to be my all time favorite).</p>
<p>Anyway, here were my complaints.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>NOISE. In a hotel, even a lower class one, guests will always be upset if they can hear the hallways or the guy next door to them. This dorm was far worse than any hotel, even the one my uncle complained to the manager about that I'd been in shortly before moving in. When noise can't be controlled, in particular, in an academic environment on a weekday night when people have class the next day, it's bad. And it doesn't help if the RA's are causing it, as they did in mine.</p></li>
<li><p>Climate control. By the time someone is old enough to design and run a college dorm, they should know that everyone has different heat preferences. I am very sensitive to cold and when the weather got to be under 50 degrees, they didn't even turn the heat on in the dorm. Sure, you had bigger guys than me who probably would have overheated, but you could at least make each room adjustable. I had to go around with my down comforter wrapped around me, who was wearing a sweater and flannel pants, just to stay warm. If I left the room, I pretty much looked like something out of South Park--ski cap, jacket, the works.</p></li>
<li><p>Lack of judgement about guys doors. I was pretty much the only one on the floor with no bad words on his door and no posters about sex. And I was the only one without a naked woman poster in my room. This sort of stuff is expected of prisoners, not college students. Maybe I was just in with a bunch of thugs.</p></li>
<li><p>Horrible RA's. They're like wardens who don't punish--they are annoying and ineffective. And loud. I left that school with no respect for those RA's and I normally respect just about everyone.</p></li>
<li><p>The place reeked. I had a vanilla air wick candle in my room. And I hate to say this, it was the best smelling room in the entire dorm.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>If I had my car on campus, despite its age, I would have likely lived out of it for a while until I had enough energy to drive it home. I slept in the back seat of it once and it was pretty comfortable, maybe not as good as a bed but it worked. Also, if I felt uncomfortable on campus as I so often did, I could drive it somewhere else for a while. But alas, that campus was so unsafe I wouldn't have wanted my car up there, as it would have surely been damaged/wrecked by some drunk idiot or by someone who knew it was mine...I was definitely not liked up there by most of the student body since I wasn't a partier.</p>
<p>I'm a Case student, and last year they opened brand new apartment-style housing for the upperclassmen. I finally got into the new digs this year and admit to feeling a bit spoiled by the rooms- my current one is about as big as the one I have at home and has a full-sized bed, which I'm completely not used to!
Of course, the flip side of the new housing is it's maybe 1-2k more expensive then the underclass housing (standard cinderblock), and that's enough to drive people off campus price-wise in many instances (meaning not all beds were filled at the beginning of the year). Plus Case has had issues with alumnai lately so our new dorms are not yet paid for, so easy as it is to refer to "House 7" and the like, it's going to get problematic soon...</p>
<p>It is a real problem if the RAs & school culture doesn't respect having enough quiet for students to study or sleep. I haven't hear my S complain about that, so I'm hoping that isn't the case at his school. We did meet the RC (who is in charge of all the RAs) in his housing complex at move-in day & she was a grad student in psychology, as were all her top staff. They really seemed to care about the students & their needs & we left feeling pretty confident in the quality of the staffing.</p>
<p>quiet is huge for me, often people don't realize how important quiet is for some people.</p>
<p>and not just quiet during sleeping hours (I can sleep through anything, I slept through the northridge earthquake) but during the day too it's important to have an enviroment that's some semblance of peaceful...</p>
<p>aside from the social aspect, i really don't see what's so good about living in dorms period, actually...</p>
<p>The social aspect & quick & easy access to lots of people to make friends with who have different backgrounds & interests from yours is an incredible opportunity. Personally, I loved living in the dorms & did so for two years as an undergrad & one year as a grad student. Had a chance to meet & form relationships (some romantic & many friendships) with many folks I would never have otherwise.</p>