UC Santa Cruz asks professors to house students
qz.com
qz.com
The article is short on details but I can't see this as anything other than a sad joke. If Santa Cruz is anything like a typical college town then there are buildings on campus or nearby that could be repurposed for this problem. Certainly there is money somewhere that could be used to purchase space (even though real-estate is at a premium) for this problem. After all, the University will have far more access to funds or loans.
However, that would come at a cost of the profits.
How myopic for them to even consider professors housing students to be an option.
Campus dorms are thousands of students over original capacity. All the lounge areas are converted to bedrooms, double rooms became triples and quads etc. Due to a long-standing feud with the city UCSC also cannot purchase any property in town that will house students. They are further restricted in where they can build on campus by both geological natural features, student protests (eg. 2 year tree sit that held up building in the 2000s), and also general NIMBYism. You are totally right in characterizing the situation as a sad joke. If only these emails were the extent of it..
I'm pretty sure there are plenty of employees at UC SC who are paid a hell of a lot less than professor-rank academics.
Like cleaners, cooks, librarians, secretaries, security, maintenance staff.
"AFSCME Local 3299 is the University of California’s largest employee union, representing more than 24,000 employees at UC’s 10 campuses, five medical centers, numerous clinics, research laboratories and UC Hastings College of the Law." https://afscme3299.org/our_union/about_local_3299/
I would hope the question that the faculty is asking is: Has the UCSC administration agreed to take any students into their homes?
The real estate market is distinct from Silicon Valley for that reason too. It's expensive, but it's expensive because it's an attractive beach community on the CA coastline, and the inland (no beach access) houses are significantly cheaper than anything you could get in the Palo Alto/Mountain View/Sunnyvale area.
The real story here the university admitting 7000 students for 5300 spots, which is an epic admissions fail and will cause problems for any college town. I've heard of Berkeley (CA), Brandeis (MA), and Ithaca College (NY) all having similar issues in various years, with similar drastic housing measures.
There are plenty of people that do it (at least in my bubble).
The massive influx of moneyed people from the tech industry has had a substantial impact over the last 10-15 years, for the entire region.
Edit:
I just remembered a relevant experience I had two years ago:
While seeking a room to rent through the wet winter, I found a house in Felton (~10 miles into the woods, away from Santa Cruz and the coast) renting all the rooms for $800/mo each. The owner was living in a container in the yard, powered via extension cord! This was basically the cheapest option I could find, and it was a total shit show. One bathroom, 7 tenants, most college-aged, and the owner's 5 year old daughter was living in the living room while the owner was in the container. Even large closets were being rented as rooms.
Obviously I passed on this option, but it was quite illuminating of how much opportunity there was to capitalize on; this guy was risking his daughter sharing a house full of strangers without him even inside.
That same week I had a conversation with a young park ranger who had recently moved to Boulder Creek, which is even further into the woods like another 10-15 miles down a twisty road. She had just moved from the east coast and couldn't find anything affordable in Santa Cruz or Felton, and just barely affords a shared place in Boulder Creek.
I would argue that if we now let land pricing affect the ability of the smartest and most energetic people in society to get the education they deserve, then we are up a creek. If even universities are disliked through nibyism then we are way up that creek.
Pacific Avenue is the main strip downtown, and is relatively nice. In retrospect, I was getting a bargain.
Notably, non science and engineering grad students got smaller stipends. So it was tough for them even then, hopefully the university has raised their package since then.
I’ll also add than non-cs grad students did not get lucrative summer gigs to soften the blow. 3 months at Google can make life much easier the rest of the year.
Sometimes you have to retreat when the sea (of rising property costs) is invading your costal property.
It's a pretty tall order to convince successful tenured professors living in a beachfront community, most of whom are homeowners and contribute to the NIMBYism of the area, to move somewhere else.
Tax dollars for education should not subsidize expensive real estate markets. You can still have your job, we're not under any obligation to keep it within walking distance of your beach front property.
How can that be avoided? Should we build every university in the middle of nowhere, and then move them around every 30 years because the university drew in enough people to cause housing to become expensive?
Miami might, but it seems like it’s more due to the beach proximity and tourism industry than FIU.
At least in computer science, UCSC has a decent reputation. Among UCs, computer science goes roughly Berkeley > LA/SD > SC/Davis/SB > the others. Non-computer science, I think Berkeley and UCLA are way above the rest except for isolated specific departments.
Top tier: Berkeley and UCLA, for sure
Second tier: most of the other ones; people love to argue about the order, but honestly most of them don't stand out above the others except for certain degree programs
Bottom tier: definitely includes UC Merced, and maybe UC Riverside
UC Merced opened in 2005 without many degree programs and faculty, and it's slowly growing. So its poor ranking is due to that more than anything else.
Why can’t we just admit that we are ethically required to permit sufficient housing in our cities? (I mean permit in the literal senses of both to allow and to issue building permits for) If we fail to do that we squeeze out the poor, elderly, less skilled —exacerbating the homelessness crisis worsening traffic (since normal people like clerks, teachers and baristas have to commute from outside the city for jobs in the city) and creating a bland monoculture.
My immediate remedy is: how about we stop blocking every effort to build new housing?
However, students living with professors is a terrible idea. There is already too much sexual misbehavior with weird power dynamics in academia, especially between professors and grad students, and this all happens without them living together. It would only get worse.
The real solution is to build more affordable student housing on or near campus, but that would require funds from the state government, which is unlikely to provide them.
Not only funds, but it would require a shift in the attitude of the locals towards such buildings.
You're making the argument that there is something inherent in professors that makes it more likely they will engage in sexual relations with people, which is problematic and strange.
We know for a fact that it happens, and there have been recent sex scandals at the UC Santa Cruz, the university mentioned in the article. This is not a weird or unsubstantiated concern. And I never said there was something inherent to professors that causes it.
Perhaps a better solution would be to reduce the student population and university size to what the local housing market and community could support, given opposition to construction of student housing. Obviously they’d need to eat humble pie for that to happen, which is why it’s not being discussed.
I'm actually tired of this discussion. My entire point is it's a red herring that distracts from the issues around housing.
Probably not that many (although it happens in grad school all the time), but let's invert the question: How many 50-year-old professors want to have sex with beautiful young people?
> I'm actually tired of this discussion. My entire point is it's a red herring that distracts from the issues around housing.
But it's not a red herring. It's a very real concern, and we know it's real because sexual misbehavior already happens between students and professors, including at UCSC! Do you honestly believe that it would not increase in prevalence if students and professors started living together?
> The real solution is to build more affordable student housing on or near campus, but that would require funds from the state government, which is unlikely to provide them. Within the UC, all the housing must be self-funded; it needs to make enough money from residential payments over its lifetime to cover construction/maintenance/services.
With UCSC in the bay area, construction is incredibly expensive. This means that the campus literally cannot build affordable housing for students. They are currently building a 3000 space complex (currently held up by NIMBYism, but that's another topic) and the "cheapest" they can build for graduate students is around $1200 per month for a bedroom in a 4 bedroom apartment. Given that the graduate students are being paid ~$2000 a month this isn't a great situation.
UCSC is really in a bad spot. Either the state needs to stop mandating blanket enrollment increases across all campuses or it needs to step in and force Santa Cruz to build.
Students living with professors isn't necessarily a terrible idea.
"The university is years away from building a planned 3,000 campus housing unit, but thousands of local residents have already signed a petition to stop the development"
So they planned on having 3000 more housing units (staff, students and additional personnel), they didn't get it. There is your shortage. The plan was flawed because it didn't account for the fact that local residents might not go along with it.
Pinning this on the tech industry is another example how lazy politicians push their problems on tech industry because it's a popular target.