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Comment by cpach | Hacker News Reader

Doesn’t US students mostly live in dorms…?

The first year, yeah. After that, people start moving out. I don’t know anybody who lived in a dorm from the third year onward.

But yeah, what poor college students trying to get a start on life and grad students making pocket change really need is some 400k/year tech workers to flood into their town, say “wow! Only 2500 a month!” and make it impossible to live anywhere.

Also, dorms are insanely expensive. And wanting to be near noisy, drunk, high college kids as an unaffiliated adult is honestly just weird.

Not really sure what to respond. Should people in the US not be free to move to any town they want? Seems like an odd take IMO.

You can move wherever you want. But on a forum where people frequently talk about the harm humans do, I think advising people to move to an area that exists basically for people who are just struggling to start their adult life seems like a bad move.

Moving somewhere because you like the scenery, the food, whatever is fine. Moving there because there’s a college while you’re 15 years out of college is just strange.

I guess that's how they managed to screw up Creste Butte, CO. Pandemic + WFH, opportunities to move somewhere with nice scenery and not enough infrastructure to support a whole score of newcomers.

Residence halls are generally competitively priced, and is often cheaper than comparable housing off campus. Residence halls are more expensive than they used to be, but a lot of that is due to the type of housing that students are demanding. University-owned housing isn't a profit center, it's only priced to cover the costs of providing it.

Is that really true in college towns? My experience (at an urban university campus that required a year in the dorms) was that the dorms and meal plans were staggeringly expensive, but the cheaper off-campus housing tended to be in older homes that had seen some very hard use as students came and went. So maybe the dorm price would be comparable with a brand-new high-rise apartment, but students didn't really need that.

Off-campus housing often looks cheaper, but that's because you're often comparing apples to oranges. As you mention, the age of the property and how well it's been maintained often varies significantly. But most places you rent off-campus don't include utilities. --That old house in the Midwest or Northeast might look cheap compared to on-campus housing in August, but your electricity and gas bills in the fall and winter will quickly change your calculations.

Another thing to keep in mind is that, on average, students living on campus have higher GPAs, are less likely to drop out, are more likely to finish on time, feel a greater sense of social belonging, and are more likely to participate in extracurricular activities. Those benefits need to be factored in as well. There have been a number of studies about this, here's a summary of one of them: https://studentlife.uoregon.edu/student-success-and-housing-....

When it comes to meal plans, if you have your own kitchen then yes, you definitely CAN eat cheaper, but I don't know many college students who actually spend much time planning their meals, buying in bulk, and actually cooking the majority of their meals from scratch. Realistically they end up eating a lot of frozen dinners and eating out - especially for lunch when they're on campus anyway. When I look at the school I went to, their unlimited meal plan ends up costing about $9/meal on average, which is a lot, but that's 3 hot meals a day, all you can eat, and you don't have to spend time buying the ingredients, cooking the food, and cleaning up after yourself.

Those eight guys I knew who split the rickety house with the two ovens whose pilot lights kept going out had plenty of social belonging. There's a huge racket in convincing freshmen to spend money they don't have, in order to live someplace just as nice as their parents had after they spent 20 or more years improving it.

You're right about cooking, at least in my experience, but you have to take a first step sometime. I grew up in the 90s with two working parents who kept different hours, and didn't learn to cook until my late 20s. But I think people's priorities are shifting, especially now that wfh is more normal.

> Another thing to keep in mind is that, on average, students living on campus have higher GPAs, are less likely to drop out, are more likely to finish on time, feel a greater sense of social belonging, and are more likely to participate in extracurricular activities. Those benefits need to be factored in as well.

The ones that don't kill themselves, sure. There's also a higher rate of suicide, alcoholism, reported sexual assaults by both sexes, drug use, etc. but those statistics don't make it to pamphlets for obvious reasons. Living on-campus is more of an amplifier of opportunities and failures. It expands the range of scenarios; it doesn't raise the floor for everyone. If you're already successful and can handle yourself, you'll benefit from the proximity of those opportunities while residing on or close too a college campus. If you're an emotional wreck or don't know your own values (which describes many people in college), then anything aside from sheer force of will would won't be of much help and living on campus may interfere with that.

My friends were generally emotional wrecks and hugely into alcohol, but they survived and have productive lives now. They weren't made of fine Waterford crystal.

> University-owned housing isn't a profit center, it's only priced to cover the costs of providing it.

That's news to me. The university charged me three times as much as I ended up paying off campus later (in a much better location).

No? In the “college towns” described, rent is far cheaper than dorm costs.

15 years ago, dorm costs were >$1100/mo, and rent was $550 where I lived, 10 minutes from the university.

Varies widely. Size of school, public/private, urban vs rural location, cost and availability of surrounding housing.

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