To some, these are the most affordable dorms in the country, and to others, they are a $15,000 a month place to live. To others, they are a $200,000 a month place to live. To others, they are a $800,000 a month place to live.
It is hard to imagine what kind of life these families have. Some of these pictures (including one that I took myself) are so depressing, I can’t even imagine what kind of quality of life these people live in.
According to a recent study from the Michigan Economic Development Corp., the average tech dorms in Michigan cost just $8,000 a month, so it certainly seems like cheap housing is a nice place to live. But is it really a place to live? Do college students really do that much better in their daily lives? I think the answer is “No.
What it really shows is that students in tech schools (or any college) can choose to live in poor quality housing without having to make significant financial sacrifices to do so. For instance, there are a lot of great dorms in Michigan for students to live in, but they generally cost around $6,000/month. By comparison, some of the cheapest places for students to live in Texas currently cost somewhere around $29,000/month.
The problem is students are choosing to live in a place where the price is roughly $50,000 a month, which is far more than they can afford to pay in rent for a single room. Not only is that an unsustainable situation, it doesn’t take into account the fact that other students are paying their own way in housing costs at the same rate. So students end up living in a dorm with no kitchen and no bathroom that’s just two bedrooms and a shared bathroom.
These problems are made obvious in the video below. The video is hosted in a new community website for students who are looking for a place to live. There are links to all sorts of useful information about the dorms, as well as a few pictures of a couple of the rooms. But the best part of the video is the conversation between two girls discussing the room they have.
After the video, the girls go on to talk about the reasons they are living in the dorm and what they expect the experience to be like. It’s obvious that they’re both having a difficult time adjusting to the new environment. This is the exact same problem that my students are having in Michigan Tech dorms. I’ve been asking them “why are you living in a dorm? Can you show me the benefit of the room you have?” and they just don’t get it.
The fact is that Michigan Tech is a great school with incredible amenities and the best professors, but I think that the reasons that they are living in a dorm are not that great. I mean come on, what is the benefit of living in a dorm if youre not going to use it? Ive found that the people who live in dorms have a different set of expectations from the people who live in apartment complexes.
While the room you have isn’t that big, I think that the benefits of living in a dorm can be summed up by the fact that you are getting to learn about a new world you have never seen before. A dorm is a great place to get to know other students because you have a chance to interact with people that you would not normally meet in a classroom setting.
This is also one of the things that Ive found with my own college experience. Ive found that a dorm can be an incredible learning experience, but often it is also so much less convenient than living in an apartment or house. The reason for this is that dorms are usually small and you don’t have much space to maneuver around. You also don’t have a whole lot of privacy.
