Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

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A lot of the cost of American college doesn't go towards education but things like sports stadiums and teams, various non-academic events, administrators, various other non-academic staff, uniquely-expensive American legal costs and insurance, on-campus police (a big wtf for Europeans), and then there are also those people who decide which Halloween costumes are appropriate for students, investigate various misconduct on campus etc.

Americans expect college campuses to be like resorts, parents expect a lot of pampering and personalized whatever for their kid etc. In Europe, university students are independent adults who take a bunch of courses, take exams etc, but have lives on their own, outside uni. They may rent a room in housing with connections to the university, but the university doesn't babysit them. They don't expect anyone else to keep tabs on what they need to do, no pampering. There is no customer mentality. You spare a lot of money this way.

So it's at least in part cultural and also reflects in different attitudes regarding healthcare, restaurants, retail, and general business conduct.

> Americans expect college campuses to be like resorts

You say that but the typical dorm room offers no privacy or air conditioning, and the showers and bathrooms are shared. They're similar in nature to SROs which the US pretty much abolished anywhere else, but way more expensive.

And then universities have the audacity to demand that students live in them freshman year, even though living off campus would be cheaper.

Yeah the dorm situation is a bit unfair.

My freshmen year I paid $8,400 to have access to a bed, desk, 4 drawers, and a third of a closet (two other roommates) for a total of 8 months (no access during winter).

Living off campus costs just about $450/mo for a private room with utilities and AC. If you could find a landlord that lets you cram 3 people in 1 room I can't imagine how cheap the rent would be

(except you won't find it because city regulations forbid more than 4 persons per lease, and you can only have 1 lease per obvious division of a house/building. To go above the limit you need a boarding house license, which is how the school gets away with charging $67k/yr for 8 people to share a 3 bedroom apartment).

And they force the students living in them to purchase meal plans which cost 3x what a restaurant meal would cost for defrosted food from Aramark/Sodexo. Obviously someone is getting paid.

Last time I ran the numbers at my alma mater, the mandatory meal plans were (in most circumstances) more expensive than paying cash for the same meals at the same dining halls.

There were a few low-end restaurants on campus too (sandwiches, wraps, pizza, burgers, etc) that were both better and far cheaper than the dining halls. Their defining characteristic was that you couldn't spend your dining dollars there.

Same at my alma mater. One point is worth $1 at the dining hall. You can top up points for $1/1, but you're required to buy a plan of at least 1,200 points that costs $1,800.

https://diningservices.wustl.edu/meal-plans/undergraduate/

I always tried to explain to people that they should get the smallest plan but some didn't get it.

That's not exactly a good sign for the numerical literacy of your undergrads.

...demand that students live in them freshman year

What? I've been watching movies and series made in USA for decades and didn't know that. I assumed that students living there was a way to save money or the parents wanted it. I had no idea it was required.

If it's in the same city, can students just keep living with their parents?

A prestigious residential university is the student's whole life. Leaving its boundaries is a special event. You eat, sleep, study, exercise, work, etc. with your classmates around the clock. Like a monastery. Administrators are not just engineering the content of lecture. They are engineering the group of classmates in the library at 12:45am puzzling out together what the lecture meant. Students who only show up on campus for scheduled classes throw a wrench in those plans. Hence the mandate to live on campus.

This has always been the image of college in the United States. The alleged change is that conditions are getting less monastic.

This mandate can relax after freshmen year because at that point you've integrated. You'll take an apartment with some friends in the neighborhood, but you won't really be leaving. The university may no longer be your landlord and your grocer, but your landlord and your grocer will be doing 99% of their business with university-affiliated customers. The neighborhood is still campus, de facto if not de jure. You're still immersed. Technically some students may use this freedom to move across town or back in with their parents, but the mandatory year on campus has brought this risk acceptably low.

When it works, it works well. I have memories from late nights in the library and from Saturday evenings in the theater control booth that I wouldn't trade for anything in the world. But many schools in their search for prestige are trying to force this on kids who don't want it, and on top of that are failing to deliver.

> If it's in the same city, can students just keep living with their parents?

It's a pretty easy requirement to get out of if you know to expect it and are able to plan a bit. Parents in the same city are one option. If you already have a lease, that often suffices. I tested out of a few generals so that I wasn't technically a freshman when I started. Etc. There are loopholes for a lot of situations.

> I assumed that students living there was a way to save money or the parents wanted it. I had no idea it was required.

It shocked me at first too. I've talked to a lot of people trying to get a sense of the other side's perspective, and a large number of parents feel that the "college experience" is so beneficial that they don't feel anyone should be able to make the in-all-cases worse decision to live off campus..... It's a tiny bit similar to the mindset behind worker protections -- some deals are so bad that workers ought not to be able to make them in any circumstances. I don't agree in the slightest that students should be _forced_ to stay in a dorm and whatnot, but people who aren't me feel the opposite pretty strongly.

IMO a lot of oddities in the US university system can be explained (please bear with me) by assuming students are viewed by the larger system not as adults consciously making an investment but as children who need to be cautiously guided into the real world. You don't get to choose to live off campus because you aren't an adult and need to be protected from making the wrong choice. You need to make friends in the dorms because otherwise you won't be socialized for the real world. Teachers assign points for homework because it will give you an incentive to do it (because you're not an adult yet and can't make the right decisions without additional incentives). It's even solidified a bit in our laws and tax code -- financial aid must be available because college is an important part of transitioning into the workforce, and any available aid explicitly assumes you have an amicable relationship with your parents and that they will pay as much as they're able to help you through the last stage of your childhood.

97% of Stanford student undergrads live on campus. At many other colleges students are not allowed to live off campus unless they submit a formal request and receive approval to do so, and 90%+ is common. Then there are other types of schools with few or no students living on campus.

Most schools don't require you to live in a dorm freshman year, at least mine certainly didn't and plenty of my peers at other schools didn't have problems getting off campus accommodations freshman year.

Students live on campus for convenience and/or for socialization/environment - its not to save money, depending on a bunch of factors it's usually possible to live cheaper off campus.

Mine did, but it was state school and cheap (10k/yr tuition and room/board)

> If it's in the same city, can students just keep living with their parents?

The uni I worked for eventually rolled out that policy after the initial "all freshmen live in dorms now" backlash, but it's a tiny fraction of the student population whose parents live in town. State unis are deliberately located away from the population centers, for obscure reasons involving a mistrust of European politics.

> State unis are deliberately located away from the population centers

Probably because its cheaper to buy lot of land away from population centers.

Can you elaborate on the last point?

US states generally have not placed their capitals in their population centers. I'm told some of it is a fear of big city corruption might have on democracy (not without reason, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_machine#In_the_Unite...).

The logic seemed to play out in land grant unis as well, but looking at some history articles about my alma mater, it seems more complicated than "big city bad" -- the big city was on the opposite side of the state boundary river, and on the opposite side of the Slavery issue. Instead as best I can tell, the decision was driven by local legislature party politics of the time, with accusations of voter fraud, vote buying, and bad faith negotiations.

Perhaps the reason most of the state unis I can think of are in small towns is simply that without a crossroads or river confluence driving trade, landowners in those areas were most eager to get a state institution to prop up property values?

I made the mistake of commuting from home my first year in university (UW, i graduated high school in the area), it is really not that great to “commute” and pure commuter schools (where most students commute to from home) offer a different experience from other universities.

One point of university is to make it on your own. If your daddy is rich, this is in the dorms, if not, you rent a basement room nearby and bike in.

I went to SUNY Buffalo and while it isn't purely commuter, there was a significant commuter population. I lived with my parents nearby and had an 8-9 minute commute. If I had an 8am lecture (before the majority of commuters were there for the day), I could typically leave the house at 7:49am and still usually get to my seat as the professor began the lecture around 8:01am.

I'm kind of impressed because when I was in college it took more than 10 minutes to find a parking space.

Lucky, I had to commute for about a total of an hour by car (to park and ride) and bus (to campus).

Depends on the University. One I went to probably 90% of students lived off campus.

See: commuter school

I had heard that there was a huge trend among colleges to build new single occupancy dorms that have the ammnities of a nice bed and breakfast. Partly due to increasing expectations and partly due to decreasing social skills around sharing living space (more only children or grew up in large house with no shared rooms among siblings). My alma mater built one of these dorms 15 years ago and it was incredibly popular.

From some quick googling: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/02/the-en...

While I understand that many students in the US are away from home, this degree of coupling between education and housing seems odd to me, an outsider. It adds a lot of requirements that certainly make the operation significantly more expensive. Even in the less luxurious ones.

True, but I enjoyed living in the dorms very much. I was never bored :-)

I moved off campus into an apartment my senior year, thinking it would be cool, but regretted it.

Many colleges have old buildings on campus that are cash cows. There's little incentive to cut margins by building new.

But recent buildings look better, and the off-campus "communities" in Texas look better than ... most apartments in New York. [0]

[0] https://www.theblockwestcampus.com/features.aspx

>But recent buildings look better, and the off-campus "communities" in Texas look better than ... most apartments in New York. [0]

How bad are the apartments in New York? The one you cite has great marketing literature but abysmal reviews: https://www.yelp.com/biz/the-block-austin-3?osq=the+block

I guess this is the equivalent in NYC.[0] Which, admittedly, looks nicer than my dorm in college, even accounting for the normal difference between advertising and reality.

But most of my Manhattan-based friends started off with summer jobs and living in spaces smaller than closets out in suburbia. But that came with a certain vie boheme that you probably don't get at "The Block" in Texas.

[0]https://www.63wallstreet.com/63-wall-street-new-york-ny/inte...

To be fair, the last time I was apartment shopping (8 or so years ago) I quickly realized that basically every apartment complex gets terrible reviews.

> things like sports stadiums and teams

I went to a large school in one of the big NCAA athletic conferences. Their stadium cost around $100M in 2020 dollars, and they bring in roughly $100M in revenue from all sports annually. They call football and basketball "revenue sports" because they fund all the others. I'm not sure how much tuition goes to sports, but the big ones are very self-sufficient. That, and they serve as marketing for the school, and that can add value to the degree.

Sure but that's just an adjacent business model with very little relationship to the core mission.

Universities could also say, run gambling halls, nightclubs, or any other business you can think of.

The criticism is they are distracted from their core purpose and mission in society, which certainly isn't to run large entertainment venues.

Sport, at least in principle, if you squint, has more to do with education. After all, grade schools have a physical education subject but no gambling subject. (Elite, pro, spectator sport is different though, that's why the squinting is required).

Generally, Americans have an obsession with what they call "well-roundedness" and a "holistic" approach which I don't see elsewhere that much. For example in European university admissions nobody cares about subjective stuff like volunteering experience, musical talent etc, when doing university admissions. It's all focused on the narrow academic subject. You also don't take generic subjects unrelated to your study program as in American undergrad.

The whole culture and concept of what a university is supposed to be, is pretty different in the US overall

I thought college sports helped university get huge amount of money. But yeah, American's obsession of sports is bewildering. Caltech was mocked in national media for their poor performance in NCCA. I mean, really? Why would I give rat's ass about NCCA or Caltech in NCCA? For all I care about, I just wanna see Caltech produce top-notch education, research, and students.

The schools don't have shareholders to whom dividends might be paid. The extra programs and the employees to support them will expand to use up all extra income.

I attended a small but well-known liberal arts school that increased tuition about 20k in well under a decade.

In a single year the tuition increased 5k, and yet the department of my major was downsized and classes that I needed to complete my degree were full. At the same time though they built a new $42 million "cultural exchange" building and began adding an enormous sports facility. It turned out that actually there was no intended purpose for the new building either, and it was mostly sat empty as far as I know.

It seems to me the appeal of the expensive colleges is at least partly that you get to hang out with other rich kids, making connections that can benefit you later financially.

It's like Donald Trump's golf-club you pay lot mostly for the chance of being part of the club

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