
I Was a Low-Income College Student. Classes Weren’t the Hard Part - phaedrus
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/09/10/magazine/college-inequality.html
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phaedrus
As the article mentions, "interim" periods between semesters pose a problem
for poor students staying in the dorm on scholarship with no where to go. At
my university the charge for staying in the dorm during an interim was about
40% the price of staying a semester. Moving was also a significant cost&effort
- with no "home base" my only choice was to move everything I owned into and
out of a storage unit - three times a year. (My parents were happy to have me
stay, but it's hours away and a hoarder house so no room for my things. Living
conditions were so bad I'd often fall sick after staying there.) One interim
period a professor let me stay in a (nice) trailer home he owned. The last two
years of college I stayed in a house owned by the family of a former teacher,
trading work on the dilapitated house for rent: the financial, physical, and
emotional burden of moving out and back between each of three semesters a year
negated most of the benefit of having a dorm room paid for on scholarship.
(Even if you paid to stay during an interim, you still had to move out for a
few days each interim, ostensibly for "maintenance" \- I never saw any
maintenance actually performed. I think it was a policy they maintained
oblivious to the chaos it caused low income students' lives.)

