My experience was that of the Arkansas student in this article. Freshman year we were required to live in the university dorms, and they were bad - two to a room, poor ergonomics (for example, the bathroom sinks were too small to fill a glass of water - I did dishes in the bathtub), the per-room HVAC had constant issues, and all that while being far more expensive than off-campus housing. A few years later I was paying less than half as much for a private room in an apartment two miles down the street with a kitchen, much nicer furnishings, in-unit laundry, included parking, and a pool.
All of that is to say: our dorms were expensive because the university had a de jure monopoly.
One under-discussed aspect of this is that so a few of these children have shared a bedroom due to lack of many siblings and oversized houses that they demand their own space in college.
This cultural change has doubled the square footage required in dormitories.
For what it’s worth, the cultural expectation to share a room in college is not universal. In the UK, Australia and many parts of Europe are often horrified to find that American students share a bedroom.
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 wonder if the concept of roommates pushed up the prices of 1 bd apartments
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.
Although historically my University (in the UK) did still have some student halls with double rooms, they were already uncommon to the point of vanishing by the time I attended almost thirty years ago.
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.
My US college had the opposite trend 10 years ago. Rising enrollment but no increase in housing led to single rooms becoming doubles, doubles becoming triples, and the shared lounges to become quads.
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.
Because I persuaded my parents to spring for one of the nicer options, you actually could have fitted another bed into my room - it would be a squeeze but possible. But for many UK students that would be impossible.
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.
It's not clear to me (the article is paywalled and I'm not giving Rupert Murdoch a fucking cent) how widespread these luxury dorms are -- I wouldn't trust WSJ to report accurately on this sort of thing -- but this kind of experience doesn't sound very common based on the experiences of recent college kids I've talked to. Some of whom went to very expensive universities.
> So maybe they lived worse before, like deep underground?
Not everybody thinks windows (aka, large holes in the wall, with just a thin piece of glass or if you're lucky two, between you and the hostile outside environment) are a must have.
I recall I opted for a room without on holiday some years ago, and they wanted to offer a free "upgrade" to a room with a window on checkin. Um, no, that's not an "upgrade" you fools, yes I came to your city to look at a variety of wonderful things, but none of those things is visible from the hotel window. So in exchange for it being slightly less secure and slightly drafty, I get to look at the carpark whenever I want? No thanks.
"Not everybody thinks windows (aka, large holes in the wall, with just a thin piece of glass or if you're lucky two, between you and the hostile outside environment) are a must have."
No, but probably the vast majority thinks so. And actual daylight has lots of health benefits. But sure, the view from my window was always very important to me personally and I simply could not live in a basement with a view to parking cars. But being able to see the sky or not, makes a BIG difference. And if it does not for you ... then maybe you forgot what you are missing. And you actually do sound a bit paranoid:
"windows (aka, large holes in the wall, with just a thin piece of glass or if you're lucky two, between you and the hostile outside environment)"
If you are not living close to the streets, which is something I also would not like - what exactly are you afraid of? That a spidermen comes into your home?
The biggest intrusion through windows that I had, was a falcon once ... and that was rather interesting (and only happened, because I left the window wide open while I was gone).
I just want to point out that regardless of how you feel about the design, "cheaper" seems to be objectively false. Munger's University of Michigan dorm cost $155 million to house 630 students, which appears to be very expensive compared to every other comparable project I can find.
> but better for the people who would live in them ... . You built a dorm just like this one 10 years ago that people love.
It caused UCSB's design review committee architect to resign:
> A consulting architect named Dennis McFadden subsequently announced his resignation from U.C.S.B.’s design-review committee. In a letter, which was later leaked, he wrote that “Charlie’s Vision” was “unsupportable from my perspective as an architect, a parent and a human being.”
> a “social and psychological experiment with an unknown impact on the lives and personal development of the undergraduates the university serves.” Having no natural light was a problem. So were stale air and tight spaces. McFadden noted that the structure had just two main exits and would qualify “as the eighth densest neighborhood in the world, falling just short of a portion of Dhaka, Bangladesh.”
> Dormzilla, as the building has been nicknamed by the local papers
> Moreno described poor ventilation and even poorer sleep. “Lots of talk of sunlamps and melatonin,” he said.
> “you had to submit, like, a waiver stating your need for a window.”
In my area, building codes require two exits for every bedroom. It's not a "nice-to-have", it's a life-saving requirement in case of a fire.
With two exits for 4,500 people, this dorm was a massacre waiting to happen. The rest of the conversation about the design is pointless, given that fact alone. It's a non-starter.
Not just 4500 people, 4500 students who mostly have never lived alone or cooked for themselves before. 3 out of 10 of the most recent reviews of Munger's other building are complaining about how often the fire alarms go off: https://www.veryapt.com/ApartmentReview-a7222-munger-graduat....
Are you referring to a UCSB dormitory proposed back in 2021. Here are the highlights of the design. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader as to whether the students and faculty were right to shut this project down.
"Charlie Munger, a 97-year-old billionaire and Warren Buffett's right-hand man, gifted UCSB a casual $200 million to build the dorm under one condition: he gets to make all of the design decisions."
"Because it's Munger's way or the highway, he has decided that 94% of the bedrooms (which, by the way, are only 7x10") will not have windows. Instead, only some of the common areas will have windows, in an attempt to get students out of their bedrooms to socialize."
"In addition to the whole no windows thing, Munger's design requires eight students to share one bathroom. The entire building also only features two exits. For 4,000 people."
Orchard Hill @ umass, 4 identical 7 story building around a circle of grass. We had windows, but they were a very small part of the back wall (they did let air/light in). I can't recall looking out, though it wasn't really scenic. I think it was 30 people per bathroom (2 bathrooms per floor). Each floor had 2 "study lounges" with tables and wall to wall windows and a balcony. To date myself, we had newly installed network access: 9600 baud to the computers on campus. There was an icecream bar vending machine in the laundry room, which was oddly cheap and memorable. It was serviceable, and being on top of a hill, your fitness improved.
Its still there (the dorm, vending machine is probably long gone..), probably almost 40 years old at this point.
People will spend as little time in it as possible, I'm sure. They'll want to get out into the yard to mingle with the other convicts. Work their job at the infirmary, helping victims of stabbings with their rehabilitation. Surreptitiously plan escapes in the library.
Emergency evacuation was indeed one of the sticking points. 4,500 students in one building, only a couple of main exits, bedrooms with only one way out. When I was in a dorm, we had to evacuate fairly regularly when someone'd set off the fire alarms burning popcorn... and that just disrupted a couple hundred of us at one time.
Who loves it? As a Gaucho alum, I'm glad he got ripped to shreds for that idea. I couldn't imagine living in such a beautiful setting and not being able to see outside. No one wants a 99 year old billionaire foisting their social engineering ideas on teenagers.
> Housing is one of the biggest drivers of rising college costs in the U.S.
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.
The article does a fairly detailed analysis of this: Housing affiliated with universities has gotten much more expensive relative no housing unaffiliated with universities over the past twenty years. Combine that with requirements to live on campus and such, and it is more expensive.
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.
All the way back in ‘03, in two college towns I’m aware of, it was significantly cheaper to get a 12-month lease on a 1-bedroom or studio apartment within a 5-minute walk from campus than to live in the dorms, even without a roomate (which you’d have in the dorm). And you’d have your own bathroom and kitchen, and more total space.
Both universities required freshmen to live in the dorms, unless they were living with family.
What is the relevance of university affiliation with respect to the assertion? Housing cost is merely a function of what the buyer is willing to bear. They could spend the same amount on an off-campus house – the cost would be the same. But is that actually a cost of college?
So, in that case, that's like a quarter of a million dollar loss (based on the article's figures) just on the housing portion of college alone. How does one ever recover from the financial hit?
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.
Back when I was debating between buying a triplex and ending my gap year, that fairytale land was the northern Twin Cities suburbs.
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.
Yes, it's more like "the person who went to a state or community college and lives in their parents' house, commuting to save money." Not spending money on housing already cuts down a lot on the money spent on college.
Not in particular, no. You seem unacquainted with the college fee structure. Some of them have Big Tuition, but almost all of them do the death of a thousand cuts, where you are subject to an endless parade of fees, so shameless that even the telcos are envious of the boldness of the bursar. It isn't merely mandatory meal plans and two years of students staying in the dorms, you have mental health fees and student union fees and ... well, it just keeps going.
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.
With tone deaf pedantry like that, I'm surprised you didn't also call out that Monsanto is no more. Its assets were bought up by Bayer and BASF quite a few years ago. You are slipping, my friend.
I have friends at Bayer, so I am well aware. I got the joke, I just ... decided to ignore it because you've been doing this odd mixture of wildly-uninformed and vaguely hostile bits like "I suppose you're going to college because you don't already have the basic life skills to figure that out." for most of the conversation rather than engaging with the article or the rest of us.
Yes, I know you got the joke. Nobody would have posted that if they thought I was being serious. It says nothing and doesn't make any sense with respect to the discussion that was in place before the dumb jokes started. That is why I continued to joke with you.
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.
As I interpret it, the subject is "One of the causes of rising college costs is very fancy dorms." It appears I was talking about that, via the "yes, you have to stay in the dorms in many places" route. What were you talking about? I don't joke much on Hacker News, the culture doesn't really encourage it.
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.
> As I interpret it, the subject is "One of the causes of rising college costs is very fancy dorms."
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.
I would count food as a college cost, certainly, due to meal plans. Many colleges, like the one I worked at, had an outside vendor working many of the eateries. They had such a stranglehold that they (anti-competitively) did not want the places they didn't run (usually little student-run things attached to a particular school, vending machines, foot carts) listed at all. First they got the contract and wowed us with some great food. Over the years, however, their prices went up, and both the portion size and the quality decreased.
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.
> I would count food as a college cost, certainly, due to meal plans.
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?
I think the most reasonable approach would be to use the differential price. Of course, that's kicking the can down the road a bit. Meal plan burger is $11, the burger next door is $10, but the burger back home in Podunk, Flyoversas is $6. Certainly the $1 differential price is immediately obvious and seems fair, but would I be eating even that ten buck burger if I hadn't moved to Cosmetropolis, New Coast? Could I argue a five dollar differential? Perhaps, but then you're getting into "the cost of college" versus "the cost of a specific college."
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.
> You're left with this kind of Sliding Doors situation where you are left attempting to compare two different life-strands
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?
I think it is for anything beyond community college or some other favorable stay-at-home situation. Most people who go to college outside of community colleges move. And many pennywise folks get a bunch of degree prerequisites out of the way via a year or two at community college before moving on. I got comparative savings just leaving the dorms.
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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
> ie, the cost of living in a dorm is rising faster than the cost of living off campus.
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.
> 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?
Here is the data. It’s interesting to see how much is varies by type, but with only 25 percent of students attending undergrad programs living at home it does seem like it’s a major part of the college expense.
The data does not answer the question of whether or not housing is reasonably considered a cost of college. Only human analysis can answer that question.
Indeed. It does answer the question of housing costs and type for college students, but you’d have to design a conclusion for what “reasonableness” actually means to answer the question: it’s a deeply subjective terminology.
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 does answer the question of housing costs and type for college students
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?
> Why would they be building so many new dorms if most students live at home?
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.
All of that is to say: our dorms were expensive because the university had a de jure monopoly.