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.
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.
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.
That would be the other son, in Chicago. Four-person suite with a small kitchen, no meal plan. $8,700.
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 - 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 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).
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.
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.
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. 
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.