We got kicked out every holiday so they could charge high rates to conference attendees.
When I was in a dorm, the dorm stayed open but charged about the price of a cheap hotel for those who wanted to stay. The rest of the rooms were rented out for conference attendees like einstein’s. All the cafeterias and the like were shut down as well.
All dorms at Evergreen remain open for the entire academic year, including all breaks. Food service did shut down over the Thanksgiving break, though.
Well, if you can call getting paid the standard 4.50/hr for an extra 8 hours that pay-period getting paid, then yeah.
It was pretty much a screw-job- you weren’t in charge of only your own dorm- they had maybe 5-6 people for each dorm area, and you had to go wander through all of them.
That’s why I never did it- I could usually wheedle more money out of my folks (“Hey Mom- I’m broke, and my friends are going to eat and then out- can I have a 20?”), and go out as well.
I don’t really know how they did the winter stuff- they never did it in my dorm. I bet they did one of two things- either filled up empty rooms, or filled up empty spots in a room.
All but one of the 11+ dorms here close over thanksgiving, winter break, fall break, spring break, easter, etc. Pain in the ass for people who don’t want to/can’t go home. Moving to live in someone else’s room for a week (or the lobby in one case) is not convenient.
What is the point of closing dorms? One mentioned no police. Okay, so who’s making sure your stuff isn’t stolen? It seems to me, if you paid for a room, you should get that room until the semester/year is up.
I never stayed in dorms and it’s been years anyway, so I can’t help from my perspective. But I just spoke to my nephew who attends a small (1,800 students) school in the midwest. All six dorms are open for those who could not travel home (like my nephew) but the doors were kept locked as they normally are during nighttime hours, which meant that one would need a valid ID which indicated their residence in the building in order to get in. There was some limited food service except for Thursday, three open hours a day at the cafeteria with lots of take-out food available.
In addition, probably owing entirely to the community nature of such a small school, two of the dormitory directors welcomed students to Thanksgiving dinner in their (in-dorm) apartments, and many of the professors invited students to their homes. My nephew had open invitations from his RD, the director of his department, the campus chaplain and his Spanish prof. He picked the latter because his wife serves homemade paella in addition to her turkey. 
I would’ve killed for an experience like that when I was in college!
I didn’t say there would be no police. I said the police run on a skeleton crew over holidays. And there’s virtually no risk of stuff getting stolen because the front doors are locked to everyone except those whose ID cards permit access and the individual dorm rooms have locks that only the residents and assistants have keys for.
Finally, since there are no classes in session, the foodservice is closed, and most students live in Pennsylvania and so go home over holidays, the campus is virtually deserted anyway.
Robin
At UK, most of the dorms closed for Thanksgiving and other academic breaks. For Thanksgiving, they locked the place up at 7 Wednesday night, then re-opened Sunday morning around 10. At Christmas, they closed 2 hours after the last final ended, the reopened at noon the Sunday before spring semester started. Same deal for Spring Break and the summer session. The dorm where most of the international students stayed was open for all breaks, and I think they might have kept another open. Some of the smaller dorms were available for the summer session.
Why did they do it? Well, if there were residents in the building, there had to be at least two staff members in the building 24/7, for one thing. If they kept all the dorms open all the time, none of the staff would get to go home for any of the holidays, and that just blows ass. Then there’s the economics of it: they cut off the heat and electricity to the closed dorms over breaks. Why heat and light and staff a 23-story building to prevent 10 people from being inconvenienced?
The policies and closings were clearly outlined in your housing application package, and if you weren’t okay with it, you could live in an on-campus apartment. Or you could just skip the University Housing department altogether and get a place off-campus.
This is a good question. At my school, three of the buildings in the Quadrangle and both of the Towers are used for hosting summer guest conferences. In many states, housing departments are considered auxiliary services and those get no financial aid from the state or from the university’s tuition fees. They have to be self-supporting. The housing director at my school explained that the bulk of the money the department gets for its budget comes from the three months of hosting summer conferences and camps. As has been mentioned above, lots of universities and colleges rent out the dorms for summer events.
Considering that situation, my school’s housing department can’t really afford to lose all the money that is associated with shutting down an entire building for a large maintenance project.* Projects I saw during my time that were pushed to the winter included makeovers of all the Quad bathrooms, repaintings some of the worse Quad rooms, and replacing the elevators in both of the Towers. So, the housing department pushes these projects to the winter break. School’s not in session and there isn’t a big market of winter conferences and camps, so the department won’t lose any money by shutting everything down for the maintenance crews to work.
- A couple times, though, my school has shut down a building for a major maintenance project for part of the summer. In one instance, the budget had a cushion to allow that to happen. In another instance, they just weren’t able to snare enough camps to keep it occupied all summer.
I always thought it was the part of the university admin’s plot make it as miserable as possible for students. They seem to enjoy pouring salt on open wounds and by closing the dorms and throwing out the miserable losers that don’t have somewhere to go on thanksgiving (like me) and give em shitty temp housing in the study hall of the residence hall furthest away from the restaurants with some cots and a smelly guy that manages to stink up the whole room. And they make you pay for it too. College sucks.
At the school I am transferring from it really sucks. Everyone has to be out of their rooms 24 hours after your last final or by 5pm on the last Friday. For example, your last final is at 9am on Wed. , you have to be out by 9am on Thurs. IF your parents can’t come and get you until say 10am on Friday, you are so out of luck. The dorm people can call the police and escort you out of your room (despite the fact that all your stuff is still going to be there because you will be back in Jan.)
That really does suck.
Our school closed the dorms for Thankgiving, Winter Break and Spring break, and obviously summer too. If you could not go home, there were rooms you could take in the international dorm (which stayed open since many of them were not going to be able to go home before summer) for a fee.
Not only did you have to vacate the dorm by six pm the day before the breaks started, you had to sign out with an RA who went though a checklist with you to make sure you really had unplugged this, turned off that, locked you windows, drew the blinds and so on. Woe be the student whose family showed up before or after their appointed check out time.
I actually know the reasoning behind closing the dorms, at least for winter break (at my school…oh and it looks like **Siegfried
**'s too), but only because I worked for housing my junior and senior year. The only time housing can work on painting the dorms is when there are no students in the building. I think we painted 5 dorms one winter break, so that made the pressure to do things that summer much less.
I think Carnegie Mellon closed all the dorms over Thanksgiving break and kept one open over winter break. It never really affected me, since I only lived in campus housing one semester and lived close enough to go home for the big holidays.
The dorms at University of Maryland are closed for Thanksgiving and Spring break. If you live on South Campus, you can pay a fee to stay during Winter Break; otherwise you’re kicked out then. I think some dorms will let you stay during the summer also for a fee, but there’s always camps and programs and stuff that need housing, so not all of them will.
In all the traditional dorms here, there’s central heating; it can’t be adjusted for each individual room. So I’m guessing they just don’t want to pay the heating bills of the entire building for a few people. They also make us unplug everything, and after the lockout they have people go around to make sure (we’re in a budget crunch). So that would be my guess for the rationale.
UNI kept the dorms open over holidays on a prior-arrangement basis, for the foreign students. It had a population of about 11,000 when I went there.
If they kept the dorms open, every RA/preceptor would have to stay for the holidays.
The place I’m currently at closes down (for the most part), but keeps one or two places open by arrangement (and for a bit of extra $$$). From what I’ve heard, so long as they have space, they’ll save a few rooms for those staying in the dorms that close down, so they’ll have somewhere to go and no one has to worry about their stuff.
This campus is almost entirely a commuter one, so in general the only students who are staying at school over a break/holiday are the International students.
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At UCSD, when I lived in the dorms there, it was total lockdown during quarter breaks, but I think they might have stayed open for Thanksgiving weekend. I don’t think you could even move in until a day or two before classes began.
During the breaks, however, the dorms would be leased out to other groups such as cheerleaders’ camps.
IIRC, at my school, dorms were open over Thanksgiving break and Spring Break, although they did ask that you inform your RA/house president if you were going to be there for all or part of the break. (Apparently so they could make sure you weren’t having a raging kegger or something).
I think they closed down over Christmas/semester break, although IIRC they were relatively accomidating in making arrangments for foreign exchange students and students who wished to stay over break.