Swimming Pools and Granite Countertops: How College Dorms Got So Expensive
wsj.com
wsj.com
All of that is to say: our dorms were expensive because the university had a de jure monopoly.
This cultural change has doubled the square footage required in dormitories.
Still, even that arrangement has been losing popularity for a while. Even if there is lot of cost savings.
I don't see how this doubles square footage though. You can obviously provide significantly smaller study bedrooms for individuals, I'd have expected this to mean maybe the space for 1000 students (sharing, blergh) now has capacity for only 800 (single), something like that.
Since I liked this city and never left I actually walked past my old halls earlier this evening, I was tempted to ask a kid to let me take a photo to prove the point but it's now well into holiday break season, anybody left in those halls likely has nowhere else to go so that's pretty bleak.
Instead, here's a brochure, check the top (cheapest and most plentiful) bedroom photos.
https://www.southampton.ac.uk/student-life/accommodation/hal...
So glad I lived off-campus (5-10 minute drive) every year after freshman year. Twice the space, better amenities, no fire alarms, nobody trashing the bathrooms, and all for half the cost.
Coming from Europe, I would never EVER share a room with someone not bound by blood / romance. And for a house only in exceptional cases (vacation with friends etc).
But living in the USA I sometimes hear that people have strangers living in their house, renting out a room, or sometimes, even roommates.
And then I wonder, is it more acceptable here because they got over it when going to college?
Sidenote: I wonder if the concept of roommates pushed up the prices of 1 bd apartments, as now you can have 2 people in there, who combined pay more than a single person.
I reckon no, since you'd have to pay more than half of the original rent for the price to go up, but you at most get to have just half the room. A higher cost per square footage, which doesn't seem like a good deal, if you could have already afforded the full rent intially.
Get back to be when see a sudden rise in "non-traditional" older students who just want to experience such opulence.
Student life is so fun that everyone is in a hurry to leave and, despite many misty-eyed stories to the contrary, nobody wants to return to it.
While some people might otherwise choose to live in the middle of nowhere where they have to pay you to take a house, the data suggests that most people (especially young people most likely to take an interest in college) already live in the places where the colleges are found.
For all intents and purposes, isn't the housing cost expended regardless of college enrolment? In other words, it is not a college cost.
https://collegeaffordability.urban.org/prices-and-expenses/r...
For one person spending 6,000 a year on housing may be profoundly difficult. For another, 26,000 a year is no problem. And it is especially interesting that 25 percent of students live at home — that’s a lot higher than I expected.
But of course what makes that “reasonable” is entirely in the eye of the human analyst which is why I provided the source data.
It would answer that question, but why would anyone want that question answered...?
The question in question asked whether or not housing is a college cost. We could ask the same of food, clothing, entertainment, etc. If you buy a new Ferrari while attending college, does that mean your college bill went up hundreds of thousands of dollars more?
Or, if you want to look at this from a different perspective, is housing an employment cost if you have a job? If you volunteer at the soup kitchen, is housing a soup kitchen cost? If you like to race cars, is your house a racing cost?
If the answer is yes, does that mean students who do things other than study have lower college costs? As in, if rent is $500 per month, also having a job means the cost would be divided between activities; let's, for the sake of discussion, say $250 attributable to college and $250 to employment. Whereas someone who only goes to school is paying the full $500 in college costs. Meaning that, all else equal, the person with the job pays $250 per month less for college than the person who has dedicated all of their time to school.
> it’s a deeply subjective
Of course it is subjective. That's why we are asking people about their subjective takes. If it were some kind of cold hard truth, what would there be to say about it?
Yes, everyone needs a place to live. But not everyone needs to live in a fancy and expensive dorm room like those that come with universities.
Especially if we assume that the cost of housing continues to climb like it has (maybe not, but let's go with it for the sake of discussion). The person who didn't go to college and bought a home instead will be likely end up half a million dollars or more richer without lifting a finger.
I suppose you're going to college because you don't already have the basic life skills to figure that out.
What fairytale land do you live in that a high school graduate can purchase a home?
Looking at current stats, a pizza driver could still do that today (working 60+hr/week since you can't get ahead of rent on a reasonable timescale otherwise, saving for 1yr if you go with a low-down FHA loan, 2 if you need 20% down). It's not ideal, and if that high school student has a kid or anything it won't be an option, but a 4/15 schedule still left me with a 3-day weekend, a full night's sleep, and I just cruised around listening to the radio and eating free pizza. It wasn't harder than college by any means.
Oh? While ~90% of the adult population in the US have a driver's license (data is lacking for the high school grad subset, but likely similar), I doubt a significant number of high school grads on the older end of the spectrum are any longer qualified to work 60+ hour weeks. ~25% of the adult population are elderly (again, likely similar for HS grads).
In fairness, I expect you are meaning recent grads. The kids today, however, have really backed away from driving. Only 60% of those 18 years of age in the US have a driver's license. Without that, you are definitely not qualified. 90+% among recent HS grads appears impossible.
I concede you may have been envisioning them delivering pizza on a bicycle. But "driver" in this context usually refers to operation of licensed motor vehicles.
Really, as universities transform into "business for the sake of business" organizations, you get administrative bloat, which gets fed through an endless series of tacked-on charges.
I would have loved to talk about the original subject in sincerity – I maintain it is an interesting question – but nobody else wanted to. Not even you. Oh well. Such is life.
I love to talk about this subject, as I have some insight into it, having my sticky hands deep into the faculty and staff data in a university for about a decade.
The subject – which is really a question – asks why is housing considered a college cost when one has to incur a housing cost no matter what (at least for all practical purposes)?
The closest thing we got as a response to that was a couple of people who felt it was a college cost because some institutions require freshmen to stay in campus-operated housing. There is certainly something to that on the surface, but we never managed to go deeper. Like, is the full rental cost a college cost, or only the cost difference between the student housing and an equivalent off-campus house? What about the colleges that have no such requirement? What about students who are not freshmen?
While the food tangent was introduced in jest, it would have also been interesting to explore that as if housing is a college cost, then it stands to reason that food is also a college cost. Along with entertainment, car ownership (for those who own a car while in college), contraception, etc.
We could have also discussed if that logic extends to other areas of life. Are housing costs a cost of running a business? That would be especially interesting as the tax man usually says no, except maybe allowing a small portion of the total cost to be reserved as an office cost. In that vein, perhaps only a small portion of one's student home – where they do their homework – should be considered a cost of college?
But there was no interest. Which is fine. The jokes most everyone else brought instead were entertaining too.
Additionally, many students with the mandatory meal plans had excess points at the end of the semester or year. No refunds.
Even at the university I attended, way back when, what I got for my money when I moved out of campus was a lot better than what I got when I had to have a dorm room and eat in the cafeteria from what was provided. Better space, better food. Or you could save your money and live in the much-smaller rooms which were next to campus.
I would start counting things as "college costs" when there was a some intersection of outside vendor, profit center, and mandatory subscription. You can see parallels with "textbooks" (freshly printed, spiral-bound, new-each-semester, written-by-the-prof) you must get at some incredible cost, often in excess of two hundred dollars. I'm not one of those people who bangs on about the free market all the time, but there's some serious quasi-regulatory capture going on there.
Total cost? If a meal plan burger works out to $11 and a burger at the restaurant next door is $10, is the cost of college $11 or $1? If the meal plan burger is, instead, $9, did your college costs drop by $1?
It's a tough problem. You're left with this kind of Sliding Doors situation where you are left attempting to compare two different life-strands: one in which you went to college and had to buy decent Wellingtons and an overcoat and gloves because of the weather there and one where you stayed at home, because the weather in Podunk is at least pleasant.
That comes down to the individual, which we cannot speak to generally, but someone considering going to college will certainly consider the options in front of them. The article's insistence that the entire cost of housing is considered a cost of college may not be a useful framework for someone doing that decision making.
While said jokingly, the bit about people going to college to learn how to determine if college is a good deal or not contains quite a lot of truth. The, typically young, people choosing whether or go to college or not generally don't have the life experience and knowledge to make an informed decision, relying on things like this article to help guide them.
I am inclined to agree with your reasoning, and touched on that lightly in the first comment. But, as mentioned then, the data suggests that most people near live where colleges are also located anyway. An individual may have otherwise lived in Podunk, Flyoversas, but if we have to establish a general case, then it seems people generally live in the same place either way. Thus, given the broad strokes at play, is it useful to call housing a college cost?
And don't get me started on getting some hapless seventeen year old to sign up for debt which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. Were barely-shaving I to walk into a bank and ask for a loan of a hundred thousand dollars or more, they would pat my head, give me a lollipop, and gently punt me onto the sidewalk. Say it is for college, though ...
Not only are you expected to take on this debt, but you're also supposed to have a reasonable idea of what it is you want to do as a career, so as to educate yourself for it. Now that's a laugh.
Yeah, really. I keep two careers in adulthood. I started the one around the age of 8 and the other around the age of 15. I find it insane people aren't already into their careers by the time high school comes to an end.
Or, should I say, I find it insane that we as a society create artificial barriers that keep most people away from careers until they are quite old. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have people in my life that were willing to push those barriers aside when I was in my learning prime.
By the time you're 18, 19, 20 you've got better things to do than educate yourself for a career. It can be done, but optimally it is much too late in life.
Both universities required freshmen to live in the dorms, unless they were living with family.
For an article about specifically those arrangements that include dorms, this is overly general.
Dorms used to be the defacto, cheapest living arrangement.
Has that changed? The article suggests $500 per month for a basic room. There is no way I could find anywhere to live for that much around here, not even in a crack shack, and I live in a small town where housing tends to be cheap compared to the cities where colleges are found. In which cities is $500 per month for rent above market?
Sure, you can opt to spend upwards of $2,000 per month (per the article) if you want to live in what is effectively a mansion, which may be something new, but you're going to spend more than that to live in a mansion off campus too, surely?
There is no implication that the students live at home (assuming that means a parent's place). If you mean home as in where one lives, doesn't everyone live at home?
> Where do all those people in the middle of nowhere go to school?
This was already covered.
But in an effort to try and salvage something here: Never underestimate the unreasonable effectiveness of the highway. Quite often people living in the middle of nowhere can get to places in the city faster than those who live inside the city. I know it is common misconception, but living in the middle of nowhere doesn't mean you have to be permanently affixed to it.
"While rental prices rose nationwide in this period, an analysis of Census data shows median rates increased at a slower pace in the areas immediately around all 12 schools than the pace for the least expensive options on those campuses."
ie, the cost of living in a dorm is rising faster than the cost of living off campus.
Some colleges require freshman to live in dorms.
And the article is about how there is now more choice in dorm rentals (i.e. from basic accommodations to mansion-living). Generally there was no mansion option in the past, and now there is, and that means some students will opt to pay more for the nicer accommodations – and that is going to reflect in the numbers.
If a neighbourhood with 100 modest houses sees construction of 100 mansions, the median value of houses in the area is going to skyrocket too. That doesn't mean the modest houses suddenly cost more.
The same article indicates that a basic unit is $500 per month. I'd love to know where you can rent an off-campus place for less than that. You would never find such a thing around here – not even if you are willing to settle for a crack den.