The competition: College living turns lavish

[33girl]

All the SSHE schools are doing this and I don’t think it’s helping enrollment one whit. “If you build it they will come” was a fantasy movie, silly administrators

Plus, if the population bust mentioned in the other thread keeps up, these buildings will be hurting for residents sooner rather than later.

[carnation]

Well, I mined their website and couldn't find out how old they are--it's been quite awhile and they now offer some four-year programs. Fabulous school!

I found a photo of the dorm--go to the bottom of the page. http://www.abac.edu/student-life/hou.../abac-lakeside

[GreekOne]

Originally Posted by carnation

This thread is over 12 years old and I know of so many universities' perfectly decent dorms that have been razed since that time and replaced with really fancy ones. Some colleges feel like they can't attract great students without them.

There's a great two-year college in the state that now has a dorm that looks like a Disney hotel. Huge lake with a fountain in front--and why?

I had a conversation about this with a friend who worked as an administrator at one of our large state schools. She asked me to describe the house that I grew up in (answer 2 parents, 4 kids, 1 bathroom). Then she asked me to describe the house that my children have been raised in (2 parents, 3 kids, 6 bathrooms). She said, "See, this is what today's students have been raised to expect. They don't want to live somewhere that they have to share a bathroom with 50 other people."

It became very clear why the administrators are being forced to raze these old buildings. We have raised a generation with different expectations about their standard of living. When you are 17 and evaluating colleges, this can impact college choice as much, if not more, than the quality of the education.

[Sciencewoman]

Our school built a new Greek Village in 2014, with shared bathrooms on each floor and a mix of singles, doubles, and triples. The developer (who also owns a large student apartment complex across from campus) told us that students want singles and adjoining private bathrooms. All of the advisors scoffed and said, "No -- do the communal floor plan. That's the fun of living in a sorority house and they can share like we did!"

Four years later, and all of use some type of "draft" to fill the last few beds in our houses each year, even though our membership numbers are 4X the house capacity, because the members would rather live in the posh apartments with their private everything. While we always have members who love the big triples and members who want to live together, there are also several each year who want to live in but insist they must have a single. And there just aren't enough of those, even though we charge more for them. These members admit they just can't share or deal with a roommate.

Man, all the sharing and camaraderie was half the fun of living in the house!!! I loved it!

[Shellfish]

My alma mater built a new dorm with all the modern bells and whistles a couple of years ago, though older dorms have been updated. There's one that was started in the 1890s, though the final wings were built in the 1950s. It was interesting to read that the dorms cost the same (maybe differentiated by size, e.g., singles vs. doubles) so as not to create a more expensive rich-kid dorm.

[Sciencewoman]

The newest dorms on our campus are reserved for Honors College students and are waaaaayyy nicer -- instead of a "rich-kid" disparity, we have a "smart-kid" disparity...it's like first class and coach.