Where are the college students?

[politicat]

34. I work for a major, land-grant university. Which has a lot of those "features".

Now, to be clear: our single biggest annual operating expense is labor, always labor. And we can divide that out into two broad categories: people who are on tenure salary whose contracts were written before about 1989, and people who are not. The first category is about 25% of the labor force, and uses about 55% of the labor budget. Their contracts specified that they would remain at their salary after retirement until they chose to stop taking a section or a research project, even if they'd reached retirement age and begun drawing their pension. So that's a cost that we're all eating, and it's hurting the instructional model. But it is a limited problem -- those contracts have not been written since 1989, and those still under those contracts are retiring and dying. The newer tenure contracts are much less generous. We'll never see their type of tenure again, and that hurts academia at large, but the damage is done. Seriously, watch the annual budgets -- capital investment is usually no more than 25% of an annual budget, and even that is rare.

As for features: We've been rebuilding student housing because the newest of the old stuff was built in the 1950s and 1960s, and has reached end of useful life -- asbestos, lead paint, failing wiring, dodgy plumbing, failing roofs and foundations, you name it. It would cost more to repair, maintain and bring up to ADA and building code than it costs to rebuild, and we get more living space for the buck. Those buildings got thrown up in a hurry to provide for returning GIs and then their children. We no longer offer 2-4 person bunk rooms with shared bathrooms at the end of the hall. We build 2-4 person pod apartments with individual bathrooms shared by no more than 2 people. The first reason is purely public health -- when an oral-fecal route virus gets into shared housing, shared bathrooms make it an epidemic. (Think cruise ship.) The old scheme averaged 3-6 days per semester of sick time. Private baths cut that to 1-2. Shared housing is a Petri dish for nasty viral outbreaks. Less sick time means more instructional time and everyone's happier if they're not walking into pools of sick at 5 am. We get a lot of parents and community members kvetching about spoiling these kids, but we, as staff and faculty, don't want to get sick, either.

The second reason is longevity. We're not actually adding more toilets per floor, or more shower spaces per floor, but it does take more piping. A shared space is going to get hit with the tragedy of the commons -- everyone has incentive to use it, nobody has incentive to maintain it, so we have to hire people to clean the bathrooms. That's $50K a year in labor costs per three floors, at minimum. A shared space is more prone to leaks, floods, and clogs, too, and leaks cause structural damage that costs more to repair. We can inspect and repair annually each 2 person bathroom for a far lower cost than keeping a shower room intact and clean. And a 2 person bathroom gets less disgusting, even if neither person is especially tidy, because it has more time to dry between uses. And for everyone's peace of mind -- a 2 person shared bath generates 2% of the interpersonal conflict that a 12 person shared bath generates. Same with a 4 person kitchen and living room versus a floor common room.

We also aim at one person per 8'x10' room. Our students are adults. They have every right to have a safe, quiet, private retreat that is theirs alone. They study better if they can close a door. They're more emotionally healthy, and thus more productive, if they have a door. And if they use that space to introduce their pink parts to other pink parts, that's nobody's business but theirs. We also find that having private spaces means less binge drinking, and thus less sexual assault and less bullying. Being trapped in a cage means people search for oblivion. We try to minimize that need.

We also encourage them to choose their own food. While we still have some food halls, we also install a microwave, a small sink, a small dishwasher, a 2/3 burner induction cooktop and a refrigerator in each pod, and they can use their meal service credits at the local grocery (and at multiple restaurants). And not a company store grocer, it's the same one I shop at, for the same prices. Inductions are safer -- it's really hard to start a grease fire or heat-fire on an induction because there's no heat, and they're much easier to clean since they're sealed burner stovetops. They're allowed breadmakers, blenders and similar small appliances that don't pose a fire risk. There's an enormous amount of food waste in a cafeteria setting, and it drives up our labor costs. If we can keep those costs down, we keep tuition and housing costs down, and it's much easier to set aside some halal pods, kosher pods, peanut-free pods, gluten-free pods, and vegetarian/vegan pods than hope that food service for 40,000 manages to get it right every single meal. Also, yeah, we do use granite countertops -- granite lasts for 75 years with minimal upkeep. Formica costs half as much and has to be replaced every 5 years under communal use. We build for decades and centuries, not years. We use industrial rated tile in the bathrooms, too -- costs 150% more at installation, but lasts 10 times longer than fiberglass or plastic inserts.

Now. Climbing walls, exercise facilities, pools. Yeah? So? A climbing wall is about a $10K investment that lasts 15 years, which among 40K students a year, is not expensive at all (about 2 cents per student per year). We'd rather our students were climbing there than going out into our local foothills and getting hurt without support. They can climb year round, and it's great full-body exercise. Same with the treadmills, bicycles, and weights in the student gym. We have pools, because we've had them for a while, we have an internationally ranked swim team, and again, it's good exercise. We want our students healthy, and that means exercise. For the most part, the decisions to buy rest with the students, who have a council, a budget and some decision-making role. (They've also got intramural Quidditch teams, and the normal sports, and dance spaces. Again, we want them active, but we want them active with less risk. We'd rather they were dancing in the dark dance gym on Friday nights than at a frat-house basement rave.) We provide bus passes because we don't have room for parking. Our eventual goal is to get every undergraduate into housing. (We have graduate housing, too.) Right now, we've got space for just under half of them, and the private market housing ranges from pits of hell to adequate. But what we provide is cheaper, cleaner, safer, and more efficient.

We are a huge campus, a small town in our own right, but a small town that provides almost full care for a group that's generally between 18 and 25. We have health services, mental health services, campus-wide wifi. All of these services would be necessary for any community of 40K. Everything serves the productivity and well-being of our students. I don't think our model works well for a 2000 person campus, or a 500 person campus, but they're villages compared to us. It's all about the scale of the model.

To compare, I live in a 25K small town that's about 10 miles from my uni. My city also has a pair of pools, three gymnasiums, a library, three grocery stores, an urgent care and a hospital, and on a patch of ground far less efficiently used. All of the services my town provides, my university must also provide, plus. We have to think of universities as small towns, not elementary schools.