I have been looking at housing options on the Cornell website as my DD really wants to stay on campus all four years at whatever college she picks. It seems from the Cornell website that housing is only guaranteed for two years, so Cornell is probably a non-starter for her, but I was wondering where the typical upperclassman lives given that the Ithaca area seems pretty rural. Thanks.
There are tons of apartments in Collegetown. Many of them are even closer to classes on campus than the dorms.
funny I just posted this on another thread.
I’ll just re-post it here, too.
“Actually the housing point is a non-issue there, since living off-campus is better in nearly every conceivable way.
By the time you’re an upperclassman few people of my acquaintance actually wanted to live on campus.
My son went to a different school where the option of living in the dorms was available for all four years, and AFAIK all of his friends there, who had the choice, opted to live off-campus as upperclassmen”
If your D wants to make her decision predicated on being assured housing on-campus for all four years, she should not attend Cornell.
However, in that case the irony would be that if she were somehow guaranteed on-campus housing there for all four years, there is a high likelihood that, come the upperclassman years, she would wind up living off campus anyway. Because it’s better.
Making this, IMO, not a great criteria to screen out a school, for most people. But YMMV.
Both of my kids went to Cornell and they both enjoyed living off campus better than on campus freshman year. They had more space, could entertain in their apartment and had a lot more privacy. I gave both of my kids cost of Cornell dorm and they were able to find very nice places to live in Collegetown.
Thanks everybody.
My son actually lived in a single in Risley all four years (he was in the same room for three of those years) . He truly loved Risley and Cornell. If dorm life is what a student wants, there are options. The program houses are available for all four years (for students who actively participate - staying is no longer guaranteed for those who aren’t involved in dorm life). As stated, most students don’t make the choice to live in dorms for four years. Mine preferred it. He’s living in a graduate dorm at Yale now and plans to do that again next year.
I was deliberately generalizing in #2, to focus on the big picture.
Indeed, Risley, if you are into Risley community, and program houses, if you are into their community, are worthy exceptions. When I was there at least the coops were the same, after freshman year anyway (though no guarantee you’d get in in the first place).
But before they apply, applicants have no assurance that they will get into those living units, or like them enough to stay. The safest assumption is they will fall into the larger pool that will wind up off campus.
Which is no hardship.
Yes, I wouldn’t use that detail to screen for campuses, but I can understand the greater worry for a parent from a distance. Somehow or other, all students find places to live, no matter what schools they attend. I could say that my kids both chose dorms for so many years because they started college so young. Meanwhile, the older one is now working on a PhD at 20 and still prefers dorm life! I only lived in a dorm my first year of college. Apartments were cheaper and had much more space (plus kitchens - I liked having a kitchen).
My D2 liked having her kitchen too. In fact the Collegetown apartments/ houses were central to her social life. She and her friends gave dinner parties. Aside from parties in general.
She didn’t come home one holiday for our holiday dinner because she was hosting her own holiday dinner party in her apartment with a bunch of her friends !!
I didn’t “like” having a kitchen, but I did learn how to subsistence-cook there. A pretty useful life skill to learn, methinks.
My daughter lived in an “on-campus” apartment last year (Sophomore). The apartments are not Cornell owned but it just next/behind the West campus dorms. This year (well at lest next semester, she spent her 1st semester abroad) and next year, she’ll be living in a College Town apartment with her friends.
Coming back to this, I just thought I’d mention something else, for the benefit of those unfamiliar with Cornell and Ithaca.
Some people may legitimately be concerned that a lot of students living off campus dilutes the vitality of campus life. And that is legitimately the case at some schools. Particularly, IMO, schools located in big cities, where that school is not the center of the local “universe”.
My own D2 started college in a big city. Her second year dorm was located off campus. She said she felt somewhat disconnected from any sort of centrality of her school. She felt just like another worker in the city.
I felt much the same way when I was in graduate school, same city different school.
Ithaca. however, is completely different.
Ithaca is a college town. And for the part of Ithaca that is on or up “the hlll” ,that college is Cornell, basically.
The areas surrounding the campus are essentially extensions of the campus. It’s as if the university had more dorm areas in all those immediately proximate locations. Actually the university does have dorms, or university-controlled housing, in those areas. There is no difference in “university-centrism” for those students living in the actual dorms vs. those living a block away who are not living in the actual dorms.
Many upperclassmen live in or near Collegetown. Collegetown is not some remote place, it is adjacent to the campus proper. Underclasssmen who do live in the dorms routinely go into Collegetown to socialize and go out. It is all one big place, functionally part of Cornell, not really separate. Collegetown life is part of the student community’s life. Not separate and apart from it.
Even further afield- and some people do choose to live further afield- There is virtually no place you can go in Ithaca and not feel you are a college student. and run into college students. A large part of the City of Ithaca is basically a playground for 18-30 year olds. They are all over the place, everywhere.
It is further different from many cities in that there is a low crime rate on or near campus, it is (relatively) not dangerous walking from campus to a Collegetown apartment at basically any time. Given how nocturnal people of this age group are, there are usually other people out and about.
In other words, many of the reservations someone might have about living off campus in a big city do not apply to doing the same in a college town, at least not this one.
^ Thanks. We have decided to drop Cornell off the list. We decided that it is too far from an international airport, is too large a school and there are other schools which are a better fit for my daughter.
As a Cornell alum, I have to agree with what the other posters have said. I lived in a dorm freshman year (Sheldon Court), a sorority house sophomore year, and two different houses in Collegetown for junior and senior years. I loved having my own bedroom in the houses, after a year in a double in the dorm and in a triple (ugh!) in the sorority house. Even though Cornell has great meal plans, being able to make your own food was also very welcome. My daughter was having the same concerns as the OP when we were doing college tours, and was drawn to the colleges where everyone lived in dorms all four years. To me, that sounded very boring. Sure, the Collegetown houses were dumps (my mom wouldn’t even use the bathroom in my jr. year house!) but they felt closer to a home than the dorms.
My D is a soph at Cornell and she lives on West in Language House, and plans to do so as a junior and senior. Language is her thing and this fits her perfectly. She is not the type to want to cook for herself anyway, so this works for her. My other D however, moved into an apartment right after freshman year. To each his own. The Cornell lottery can be a bitch if you don’t get a good slot.
This is perhaps a not-very-parental point to make, but it should be noted that one feature of non-university controlled housing is that there are no RAs.
The year before my D2 decided to transfer I took the family on a vacation trip to Ithaca. Not the first, but the first in a while. As we drove through Collegetown on the way towards campus she took a seemingly inordinate interest in a house we passed that had a ping-pong table and a bunch of plastic cups on the front porch.
At her city school students generally lived in college-owned housing for all four years. And there were few places for students to congregate and just hang out. She was not having much fun there.
Suffice it to say that, for some people, the transition to adulthood in the upperclassman years sometimes involves some activities that are most easily accessed outside of the purview of university housing and RAs.
“[kid]s just wanna have fun”
Cindy Lauper, PhD
For the benefit of others reading:
Not every “international airport” in the US has direct flights to every international destination. If where you are going does not have direct flights from a particular airport, then you are taking a connection.
Well, you can get a connecting flight out of Syracuse, too. And out of Ithaca, for that matter, if the times happen to line up.
I guess we all need reasons to whittle down our list, but to me, having to use a connecting flight , on the very infrequent occasions you’ll make that trip- is not in itself necessarily a deal breaker… Though it could be, if the connection is particularly horrible.
Many international students, and students from California and other remote points, attend Cornell, and most probably use connecting flights to get there.
Of course OP cited other reasons, not taking issue with that decision at all. I just wanted to make the above point for benefit of other readers considering the university.
@monydad - you are right, we had to whittle down the list somehow, so we initiated a one-flight only rule. So a number of schools that were on the long list but you need 2 flights to get to, for example, Tulane, Vandy, CMU, etc quickly dropped off. As an aside, I often have to travel to the USA on business and on occasion had to take two flights to get to my final destination. Having to fly into an international gateway airport, and then transfer to a second flight on a prop plane or a 50 seat small jet can add up to 5 - 6 hours to the total journey time and can be a bit of a nightmare if you are already tired from a transatlantic trip and have to go right into a meeting upon landing. I thought this type of travel would be somewhat unpleasant for my daughter who is very young for her class. Cornell also fell off for other reasons that I mentioned above and none of the other schools I mentioned above were near the top of her list anyway.
As an aside, my son ended up (for other reasons) picking a university only 20 minutes from the int’l airport. Having been to his school 3 times in the past year, I definitely appreciate the ease of travelling there. Also, as he gets a bit older and has to travel more for job/internship interviews, etc, he will come to appreciate being close to a major airport.
Fortunately, there are plenty of airports across the USA where you can fly direct from London, which is very helpful as we are trying to find a few options outside the typical Boston - DC corridor where all the other London schools seem to apply.