doing the math: jaclyn325mink

jaclyn325mink

doing the math

Jun 03, 2005 19:18

Okay, here's my rant for the month: How Kutztown University is Ripping Us Off, Part 5,304,286

I used to think living on campus was a reasonable alternative to fighting for the overpriced, shoddy living quarters that seem to be available in this and a lot of other college towns. My assumption was that while off-campus housing looks cheaper at face value, there had to be a lot of hidden costs, including food and utilities, that evened everything out. Not so. On-campus apartment style living provides cheap construction and unnecessary hassles at outrageous prices. Let's take a look:

Housing. For the Golden Bear Village South on-campus apartments, a double room now costs $2606 per semester (or $5212 per year) and a single room is $3022 (or $6044 per year). The apartment I shared last year housed six people, four of us in doubles, two in singles. For the current rates (which have gone up since we were there), this amounts to a total $22,512 per year for rent, or approximately $3002 per month. For this rent, however, students do not have the option of staying for the entire school year. Just like traditional residence halls, we are forced to vacate the property for Thanksgiving, winter, and spring breaks. One might argue that the university would be losing money by paying for utilities serving students who wished to stay for all or part of these breaks (many students do not want to spend three weeks at home in the middle of the school year by the time they are upperclassmen). Also, there is the question of dining hall availability, etc. Since these on-campus apartments are all equipped with full kitchens, limited or no cafeteria hours could be a reasonable stipulation. Also, if the school were concerned about utility costs, they might consider making the apartments a little more liveable by turning down the central air. During warm weather, our apartment was often kept unbearably cold, to the point where we would need hoodies and blankets to keep from getting too chilly. Sometimes that still was not enough, depending on the outside temperatures we were coming in from. On a 75 degree spring day, the air conditioning was on so high that one of my roommates could not get to sleep, even with a blanket, because she was too cold. There are no climate controls in the apartments. I would have been just as happy to turn the air off and open the windows, but we have absolutely no control over our environment. In addition to overdoing it with the climate controls, all of the rooms have high ceilings. While this makes everything seem bigger and more open, I think it's a little unnecessary to have ceilings that high in student housing. Lest I forget to mention it, our peace was invaded every single night at around 7pm for the "nightly announcements," preceded by a loud, startling tone that made us jump every time. These announcements were usually the same every night, leading me to wonder why they could not limit them to once per week. Also, the speakers were so loud you could not carry on a conversation while they were in use. Like the central air, there was no way to change this. If this isn't making it seem not worth the rent, consider this: when we moved in, the buildings were brand new. None of the construction dust had been cleaned out, so our kitchen and bathroom cabinets were full of sawdust. There were empty beer cans in one of the kitchen drawers, they forgot to put screens in about half of our windows, half of our room had not gotten baseboard trim, the walls were not primed before they were painted, the color of the purple couch rubbed off on the white walls, and there was so much dirt in one of our bathroom showerheads that it reduced the water pressure to the point of making the shower unusable. Most college residence halls have recreation areas with pool/ping pong tables, and so did ours. The difference: most of the time, the equipment is available for use anytime, you just need to contact the RA/CA/whatever on duty. Ours was available during front desk hours, which were Monday-Friday, 11am-7pm...when most people are in class.

Not only is this all a huge rip-off, but some people are being put into on-campus apartments without the option of living in traditional residence halls. Due to the volume of new freshman coming in, the overflow is being placed in on-campus apartment style housing. Not only does this deprive you of the freshman experience (it is hard to meet people in the apartments because no one talks to their neighbors...the exact opposite of freshman halls), it is really pricey. A typical double room in traditional halls is $1975 per semester, or a $1262 difference for a year. Not only is the overflow being pushed into apartments, but the university is creating "reduced rate triples" to help ease the housing crisis. These are basically double rooms or former student lounges with extra beds thrown in. The beds must be bunked to accomodate the desks and wardrobes, and one student usually ends up with less storage space.

This could be written off as supply and demand, except that the university controls the demand. Clearly the demand for housing is too great, and the simple solution seems to be to admit only the students the university can accomodate. There are plenty of unmotivated individuals here (and at every school) that quite possibly should not have been admmitted in the first place. However, the school keeps accepting larger and larger freshman classes, proving to me that they are just out for money and a quality living/academic experience is a secondary concern.
[scary music] RESNET. A by-product of the this housing crisis and the construction of so much new housing within such a short span of time is a deteriorating network that it seems no one wants to bother to fix. When GBVS was built, it added significantly to the network traffic. However, the network was not expanded to accomodate this increase, and so we ended up with an overburdened network. Not only that, but the only place the university isn't milking us for money is the technology fee. While at Lehigh, I enjoyed an incredibly stable network that really left nothing to be desired. Lehigh's Library and Technology Services charges a $120 "technology fee" every semester to all full-time students benefiting from Lehigh's technology services. This means on-campus students as well as off-campus students who use the university's free ISP. This fee is not assessed to co-op, study abroad, distance learning, part-time, or summer session students. Here at Kutztown, full-time students are not assessed the technology fee. Part-time in-state students are charged $25 per semester, while out of state part-time students are charged $38. This difference, weighing in at a little less than $100 per semester, leaves us with crappy network security that leaves us vulnerable to denial of service attacks that can (and do) bring down the entire residential network. DoS attacks were responsible for countless network outages throughout the year, most notably 3 12+ hour outages within four days toward the end of the spring semester. This is the result of Windows users who have not properly secured their machines, but stupid Windows users are everywhere, including at Lehigh, where I never experienced these kinds of problems. These outages aren't just annoying. There are plenty of classes these days that require assignments to be uploaded to a webspace, not handed in on paper. This, combined with internet research, leaves students dependent on the internet not just for recreation, but for schoolwork as well. Also note that I am not including in these "outages" all of the times when the residential network was down and all traffic was funneled over to the administrative network. This resulted in hours--and sometimes days--of a connection so slow it was basically unusable. We're talking up to a five minute lag time on instant messages.

One of the key perks of living on campus is free high-speed internet and cable television. Currently I pay Service Electric Cablevision $33.99 per month for a full channel lineup (everything but digital premium) and internet access. If I were paying this alone it would exceed LTS' tech fee by around $15 per semester, but I won't be. I will be splitting this three ways August-May, which brings it down to about $45 per semester. It seems a small price to pay, especially considering the savings on rent. Currently I pay $4200 for Aug-May rent, which amounts to a savings of $1012 per year.
Okay, last thing. Meals. This is what got all this started tonight. I took all of my supermarket receipts for the 2004-2005 school year and added them up. While living in GBVS, I had a five meal per week plan. This plan included $150 in flex dollars and cost $770 per semester. Subtracting the flex money, that is an average of $8.27 per meal. At that price, it would have cost me less to go to Betty's or the Airport Diner for my meals. Not only that, but when I averaged out what I had paid to prepare my own meals, assuming I ate three meals per day and subtracting the flex with the assumption that each flex meal cost $5, it came out to an average cost of $1.67 per meal. That totally floored me. I know there were times when I went out to dinner with friends or boyfriend, was given food by well-meaning moms, spent weekends at Lehigh, etc. etc., but there is no way those occasions would multiply that average nearly 8 times. So not only is the school charging restaurant prices, there is a new policy this year that keeps resident students from getting anything less than the 15-meal-per-week plan. That means that apartment-style on-campus residents no longer have the option of a happy medium between cooking for themselves and the convenience of picking something up at the dining hall. The 45 meal block plan has also been made for commuters only. Basically, this means that students living in on-campus apartments are getting screwed again.