While attending college in South Central Los Angeles, I split a three bedroom apartment around the corner from a few Mexican restaurants and a gas station with four other girls, occasionally one of their boyfriends, a dog, a hamster, and approximately 1,000 cockroaches.
The next year, I lived in a similar motel-like building, but a street over. We didn’t have the roach problem there, but we did lose power whenever the temperature crept into the triple digits, which in Los Angeles meant most of August and part of September. By the time I graduated, I excelled in showering in the dark, slaughtering insects, yelling at landlords on the phone, unclogging washing machines broken by communal use, and cooking entire meals with only non-perishable groceries.
I also went to USC, not inaccurately mocked as the University of Spoiled Children.
Life on campus was needlessly decadent. The business school sold $10 ramen and $15 dollar rainbow rolls, whereas under a mile or so down Figueroa Street, you could get both for substantially less. New buildings also had water spigots with seltzer on tap, but if that wasn’t to your liking, you could pick up a juice from the campus Nekter, also often priced in the double digits.
At USC, staying off campus was pretty much the only way of staying in touch with reality. The school earns its moniker, and during the disgraced ex-president’s push to become the most prolific university fundraiser in history, the school leaned into the worst of its excesses, spending $700 million to replace a tract filled with local businesses with a university owned “village,” an architectural monstrosity described by the Los Angeles Times as where “Disneyland meets Hogwarts,” to house new student dorms for upperclassmen, an Abercrombie & Fitch, SunLife Organics, CorePower Yoga, a facialist, a nail salon, and a number of other shiny new restaurants and clothing stores.
The Village may be extreme, but its just leading the trend of universities across the country.
As the Atlantic documents, new dorm amenities include rock walls, lazy rivers, and 3D printers. While USC is used as the article’s lead image, Joe Pinsker details the national push for luxury dorms on campuses, as decisive shift from the economic room and boarding of the past. Pinsker writes:
…
In the mid-’80s, a confluence of factors led colleges to compete more intensely for enrollees, and they began orienting themselves more toward the desires of students. “You have upper-middle-class families visiting a campus, and parents are saying, ‘My goodness, we’re paying this amount of money for tuition for our son or daughter, and they’re living in this nondescript place,’ [one] that may not be well maintained,” Thelin said.
The rationale for building fancier dorms and rolling out plush amenities is that doing so might entice prospective students—especially those who can afford to pay full tuition—in a competitive higher-education market. But it’s not clear that this reliably pays off.
The irony of unfettered public funding driving the decadence of dorms as Democratic activists demand free college aside, all the rage of luxury dorms misses a key point of the university experience: maximizing the economic value of students.
In the short run, universities earn a killing from maximizing their intake of government and private funds. Part of this involves making university living as expensive as possible. USC currently faces a lawsuit for defrauding a number of Village restaurants to increase their own profit margins, and surely more are to come. But the mere dollars-and-cents cost ignores the fact that 18-year-olds attending college are literally adults, and coddling students in luxury dorms deprives them of learning how to cook, clean, sign a lease, and live with other people in tight quarters. A part of increasing your economic value relates purely to the skills and connections driving your career, but another part is your emotional development, as well as your basic ability to maintain your own living space.
The case against luxury dorms is exemplified by the gentrification of South Central and general snowflakery of sending students to spend four years divorced from the market forces that require them to be generally pleasant human beings that other people want to live with and frequent local markets and restaurants that keep prices low and quality high. But just because USC is the punchline of the joke doesn’t mean that the problem isn’t widespread. Does the student who doesn’t have to make a single meal in college, let alone by groceries or leave the luxuries of a government subsidized campus, learn as much as he who dealt with the vicissitudes of cheap apartments, decrepit houses, or, at the very least, only one year in a standard dorm?
Sure, the memories of carrying ten pounds of clothing half a mile to the laundromat and turning $15 of groceries into a dinner party in my dingy living room are fun. But ask any college student who had to leave the confines of campus for the slightly less-privileged bubble of private housing, and they’ll all concur that you can’t put a price tag on the life skills built from those experiences.
