# Do colleges eat tremendous losses every year while providing student housing? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [March 15, 2011, 3:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-colleges-eat-tremendous-losses-every-year-while-providing-student-housing/574744 "2011-03-15T03:34:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![alphaboi867](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alphaboi867/32/3898_2.png) [@alphaboi867](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/alphaboi867)\ **Post date:** [March 15, 2011, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-colleges-eat-tremendous-losses-every-year-while-providing-student-housing/574744/41 "2011-03-15T22:42:19Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Quoth **Superhal** :Even a shared bathroom with another room is a pretty good deal: Most dorms I’ve seen have no bathroom connected to the room at all, just one big communal bathroom down the hall shared by a couple dozen rooms. And no kitchen facilities either, of course. I would’ve gladly traded our 4-man suite’s shared bathroom for a communal one if I didn’t have to have a roommate. Sharing a room was the worst part of living in a dorm, right up there with the biweekly 2am fire drills and not having a kitchen. Only RAs got singles though. ---
**Author:** ![Eva\_Luna](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e495f1/32.png) [@Eva\_Luna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eva_Luna)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2011, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-colleges-eat-tremendous-losses-every-year-while-providing-student-housing/574744/42 "2011-03-16T00:32:03Z")
> [@sitchensis](#): > > I would also look to the price per square foot. I spent one semester in a dorm at Washington State University. I can’t remember the numbers, but the price per square foot was exorbitant. The only semester I had to take out loans was the one I was in the dorms. Seriously. I haven’t been in the undergrad dorms at Columbia, but I spent the night once with a friend who was a grad student there. Her room was just about big enough to fit a twin bed and a teeeeeny desk, and there were shared bathrooms and very minimal shared cooking facilities. My undergrad was at NYU, and I don’t remember the specific numbers, but they priced the dorms such that it was a bit cheaper than splitting a studio apartment with a friend because of the aforementioned ability to have the dorm for just the school year vs. having to sign a full year lease on an apartment. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2011, 12:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-colleges-eat-tremendous-losses-every-year-while-providing-student-housing/574744/43 "2011-03-16T00:38:01Z")
> [@appleciders](#): > > Just chiming in-- statistically, there’s a strong correlation between living on campus as a freshman and graduating within four (or five) years. Correlation is not causation, but many colleges do buy into this. I’ll see if I can dig up some cites. > > That said, in my college experience, finances were a huge reason that most juniors and seniors lived off campus. It was a small town, so it wasn’t difficult to get your own room in a house less than half a mile from campus for less than $350 per month. Personally, I lived alternately in kind of crappy houses and houses more than half a mile away, so I never paid more than $200 per month in rent. That may be the reason then, I assumed it was mostly financial. But if the goal was to ensure that students were more likely to graduate it explains why transfer students like myself were not required to stay in the dorms. Evenso, dorms offer less privacy and anemities compared to what you’d find off campus. So they are still financially unsound. ---
**Author:** ![Kent\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kent_clark/32/105_2.png) [@Kent\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kent_Clark)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2011, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-colleges-eat-tremendous-losses-every-year-while-providing-student-housing/574744/44 "2011-03-16T02:42:22Z")
> [@Dewey\_Finn](#): > > Yes, but your numbers are for room _and_ board. The numbers I quoted for Columbia are just for the room. The estimated room and board total for Columbia is over $10,000. That would be the other son, in Chicago. Four-person suite with a small kitchen, no meal plan. $8,700. ---
**Author:** ![LateComer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/b5ac83/32.png) [@LateComer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LateComer)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2011, 3:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-colleges-eat-tremendous-losses-every-year-while-providing-student-housing/574744/45 "2011-03-16T03:38:44Z")
> [@Voyager](#): > > Anyhow, one year or two, the point remains that if schools were making tons of money on dorms they’d not want to kick kids out of them. Perhaps they kick them out to make room for freshman, money may have nothing to do with it. I work in housing at a public university in Western Pennsylvania. I can’t speak for all universities but some things about our operation: We just completed a $270 million rebuilding of our halls (through a [complicated public/private partnership](http://www.iup.edu/magazine/exclusives/page.aspx?id=77923) - state money just couldn’t make this happen) to make them pretty much all suite style meaning that the most a student would share would be a bedroom and bath with one student. This was done to attract students who more and more do NOT wish to live in a 30+ year old traditional dorm sharing a bathroom with 40 other students. [Our prices by my calculations for room and board combined](http://www.iup.edu/page.aspx?id=23035) would be a minimum of 3,261/semester (6,522/academic year) for a traditional room with the cheapest mealplan to a maximum of 5,471/10,942 for a private room with the most expensive mealplan. One thing that surprised many of us as we built these new buildings was the sheer demand for these suite rooms. Some of us thought we would have trouble keeping them filled as long as there was a near half price option in the tradional dorms but the opposite is true. While it used to be that upperclassmen couldn’t wait to get out of their contract and move off campus we often have them crying in our office if they can’t get back into the suites once they have lived here their freshman year. Price doesn’t seem to matter to most students. We have to limit upperclassmen spaces to about 1000 (out of about 4300) in order to guarantee all freshmen a spot (yes we have a residency requirement). I haven’t studied the off-campus market but it is generally believed that our new buildings have created a bit of an arms race with private developers having to up their quality to compete. Of course rent doesn’t tell the whole story, off campus may have to pay utilities/cable/telephone/internet and have to commute. Housing here is an “auxillary” meaning that though we’re part of the university our department doesn’t get money from the rest of the university. We have to be self sustaining. “Make money” doesn’t really apply at a state institution as all reserve money will eventually make its way back into the buildings or into programs or back into the university (especially if our governor is able to cut 1/2 of our state funding as he has proposed). ---
**Author:** ![MsRobyn](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/90ced4/32.png) [@MsRobyn](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MsRobyn)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2011, 12:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-colleges-eat-tremendous-losses-every-year-while-providing-student-housing/574744/46 "2011-03-16T12:31:19Z")
> [@Rigamarole](#): > > I’ve always wondered why they do that though - it’s not like they’re renting them out short-term to wayfarers during the break. Obviously there are operating/maintenance costs, and I suppose enough people want to leave during the breaks that they’ve determined it not to be worth it to keep them open, but it seems like there are also enough students who still need a place to live that it would be profitable to keep them open year-round. It’s also easier for the university to do maintenance during the summer, when there aren’t that many people living in the dorms. My university did the painting, plumbing and electrical work, and so forth during the summer so as not to disturb a lot of people. It’s easier to paint when you know there isn’t a dormful of kids breathing fumes. ---
**Author:** ![joebuck20](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/74df32/32.png) [@joebuck20](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/joebuck20)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2011, 1:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-colleges-eat-tremendous-losses-every-year-while-providing-student-housing/574744/47 "2011-03-16T13:13:51Z")
I’m surprised to hear some of the numbers mentioned in this thread. I guess the price of room and board has skyrocketed in recent years. When I was going to school (late 90s, early 2000s), I believe the cost for a single was around $4,000/yr, give or take a few hundred, and that included the meal plan. State school in the Midwest. A lot of students did move off campus, for various reasons, as soon as they got the chance. But I spent most of my college years in the dorms. Yeah, I’ll admit the room was tiny and sharing a bathroom with a bunch of other guys wasn’t the greatest. But I also lived in one of the newer dorms on campus, so I had the luxury of air conditioning in the summer. I had a single (I shared a room my freshman year, but my roommate was such a pain in the ass, I was determined to live by myself the following year). And I just liked the convenience of being near my classes (or at least within walking distance), not having to pay utility bills each month, getting free telephone and cable and not worring about buying groceries. ---
**Author:** ![mhendo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mhendo/32/3159_2.png) [@mhendo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mhendo)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2011, 8:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-colleges-eat-tremendous-losses-every-year-while-providing-student-housing/574744/48 "2011-03-16T20:21:02Z")
> [@acsenray](#): > > John Hopkins? **John** Hopkins? Tsk-tsk-tsk. Did you _really_ go there? 😛 Wow, that’s pretty bad. This is, of course one of the biggest peeves of most Hopkins-affiliated people, the fact that so many people get the name wrong. I think George Bush even made the mistake a few years back, when the Hopkins national champion lacrosse team visited the White House. In my defense, it was just a typo. 🙂 > [@kenobi\_65](#): > > Do you remember which dorm you were in? I lived in the Lakeshore Dorms for all four years of my undergrad work at Madison. 🙂 If my hazy memory, combined with a UW map, is any guide, i think it might have been Humphrey Hall. Does that seem right? ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2011, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-colleges-eat-tremendous-losses-every-year-while-providing-student-housing/574744/49 "2011-03-16T20:49:06Z")
> [@mhendo](#): > > If my hazy memory, combined with a UW map, is any guide, i think it might have been Humphrey Hall. Does that seem right? Yup. That’s one of the “summer” dorms…at least when I was there, its primary use was for people who came in specifically for summer classes. (It’s across the street from the two dorms where I lived, Kronshage and Adams Halls.) During the regular school year, it served as an “overflow” dorm for kids who had signed up to live in the dorms late, and had to wait for a room to open up in one of the traditional dorms. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/do-colleges-eat-tremendous-losses-every-year-while-providing-student-housing/574744.md?page=2)