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There are only two ways to give everyone a private dorm room:

1. Drastically reduce admissions until a 1:1 ratio of rooms to students is achieved. Once rooms are full, you have to reject students. Overall college admissions is cut significantly.

2. Massively increase tuitions so that more single-occupancy rooms can be built

So which one do you choose? I suspect most of these proposals rely on a world where money is infinite and nothing has to be sacrificed to get there.

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Or make all the rooms smaller single rooms rather than intentionally building all the rooms as doubles?

Or don't require students (especially freshmen) to live in dorms so more people can live in apartments off campus to reduce the need for dorm rooms?


That’s not actually feasible. It’s cost prohibitive to refactor all the shared dorms and/or tear down and rebuild a significant fraction of on campus spaces.

Just two options huh? Who's agenda are you pushing?

Umm.. these elite universities are sitting on tens of billions of dollars in endowment funds. They can easily build dorm rooms if they care to - especially given the universities already own the land and have vast amounts of unused land.

I think there is a fallacy to look at endowments like they are checking accounts. Or to assume elite universities generally have unused land or can rebuild a large amount of their dorms for less than hundreds of millions of dollars and significant disruption to campus life



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