Just like North Korea.
Yah, I had that too. My mom cooked really good food and the laundry room was next to my palatial private bedroom where I could study in peace. Sometimes she’d do my laundry. Every area in college that was designated as a place for students to congregate looked like the inside of a poorly maintained trash can. The first lesson I learned is how good I had it at home.
I have no problems objecting to it. If they want to force students to live there then the faculty should be forced to live there too.
I had to work my way through school and wasn’t about to pay extra for a substandard environment. There was nothing enriching about being forced into a noisy dirty shoebox.
I don’t think there is a clear cut reason for this based on all the responses here.
Someone mentioned that it could be their desire to fill up the dorms - my university (boston university) had an overflow during the first 2 or 3 years of me living there. They had to rent out rooms in 2 hotels (Hyatt was one… some freshmen loved it but it was a good 15-30 minute walk to class without public transport in the snow… Not to mention no dining halls.
Someone mentioned college life or community - well, BU doesn’t have a campus. It’s primarily spread out over 2.3 miles (probably longer by now) along one street (Commonwealth Ave). There were freshmen dorms, but if they were full, you’d be placed with random upperclassmen or worse (see above). This lead and probably still leads to a lot of students leaving due to depression of being stranded in a big city without any close connections. Imagine having to walk to an 8 am class for 15-20 mins in freezing weather 3 times a week from an upperclassman dorm (that was one of my first semesters). It’s painful. And since most of your friends will be freshmen unless you take higher level courses, they will be in various freshmen dorms spread out all over - not easy to get study groups and other things going this way. It’s even worse if your friends are upperclassmen (most of mine were) because you take advanced classes because they typically lived in upperclassmen houses that were even further away.
Security wise - I don’t know what’s less secure than a 2.3 mile long campus, stretched in various directions. I was on the student senate for a year and we had close links with BUPD… the rape stats were about 2 out of 3 girls (these are unofficial because at the time BU, as a catholic school, did not have rape prevention center and would kick you out of the dorms if you said you got drunk and were raped (because you’re under 21), so no one reported them and there was no real center to report them to anyway or help you in any way).
I imagine it’s more of a fee thing than anything. They feel that you are less likely to move out of their crappy dorms into normal apartments if they stick you with a meal plan and a dorm (speculating based on many other fees they randomly threw into my account that I had to then manually credit back because they were for things I did not want/need like a year round sports pass and a jacked up meal plan). At the time, some waivers were possible for those who lived in the area, but very few BU students actually did… in fact I think I’ve only ever met one student who was from Boston.
But that’s just my school.
In any case, there is a simple way to bypass this - just get caught drinking or break some other dorm rule (our Uni had a very strict guest policy for example) and it’s an insta kick out of the dorms. Not sure if you get the money back though.
My undergraduate university (University of Toronto) had no such rule.
Why? Probably because it was situated in the downtown of Canada’s biggest city, where many students could (and were already) living in the city and environs; either with parents or in other arrangements. In addition, residence spaces (we did not call them “dorms”) were quite limited, so the University did not encourage local students to apply for residence at the U unless they absolutely had to. It did run a housing office, that informed all students (even first-years) of roominghouse/boardinghouse/etc. opportunities off-campus.
Still, in spite of that, there was a good community. There will always be those who just show up for class, and those who spend all waking hours (except for classes) in the library; but I don’t feel that my undergrad experience (I never lived in residence) was anything less than those students who lived in residence: I played Varsity sports, wrote for the newspaper, did drama, and so on. On a day when I had two hours of class, it was not unusual for me to spend 12 hours on campus: studying, practicing, rehearsing, yakking in the coffee shop, and so on. The fact that I was what you might call a “commuter student” did not get in the way of getting what I believe to be a well-rounded education.
In short, some of my classmates walked across campus to get home; I jumped on the subway. Big deal, and no difference.
I’m really not sure what you mean by this. My son, who did not have a lot of resources to attend college, chose a school that was 900 miles away from our home, but part of his financial aid package (which wS a very good one, btw, and without which he could never have gone there) included a grant that was essentially the cost of round trip tickets between home and school. My understanding is that this is not unusual. So why does a kid have to go to a nearby school? And what is wrong with community college anyway? Or do you not have them where you live? Two years of cc followed by a transfer to another institution is done by many many people who don’t have lots of resources.
Reported