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August 30, 2010 11:00 AM
An Awfully Nice Dorm…
College costs go up for a variety of reasons. One is that state funding is declining. Administrative costs are also increasing. But these aren’t the only things that jack up college prices. It’s the dorms. As David Randall writes in Forbes:
While there are obvious costs like annual upkeep and heating, the biggest single reason why dorms are getting more expensive is that they are much nicer than they were 20 years ago. Colleges have spent millions of dollars renovating or building new dorms in order to offer the same sort of suburban comforts that many students are accustomed to.
It’s not just that they want prospective students to be comfy. Institutions compete with each other not only for the brightest students, but for families who are able to pay full price. These families may see a cramped, shared room that hasn’t been renovated for years as a deal breaker and take their dollars elsewhere.
This concern for student comfort (either on the part of colleges or the parents of college students) is a relatively recent development. Until recently most colleges didn’t have dormitories at all. Students either lived in fraternities and sororities or rented space in boarding houses in town.
And then something changed. It doesn’t really appear that students get much out of all this comfort, except higher debt upon graduation. [Image via]
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Walker on August 30, 2010 11:43 AM:
And then something changed. It doesn’t really appear that students get much out of all this comfort, except higher debt upon graduation.
This is true now.
However, when I was in college in the late 80s, early 90s, college dorms were the only way to get high speed internet (my dorms had T1 lines in the late 80s). If you lived off campus, you were relegated to connecting via modem. You had to compete with all of the other students off campus during peak hours, and you got at most 1200 baud. This was in fact the reason why I decided to stay on campus through senior year.
It was not until the Internet was made available outside of universities, and the proliferation of broadband, that this advantage of dorms was negated.