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The Dispatch wrote
OSU spends on dorms as step to energize campus
Monday, May 5, 2008
BY ENCARNACION PYLE
In E. Gordon Gee’s perfect world, all OSU undergrads would live on campus, as they do at Vanderbilt University, where he used to work. But that would be hard to accomplish on the nation’s largest campus, so Gee has settled on first trying to get all sophomores to live in residence halls by 2012.
Gee’s grand vision includes bringing together as many students, professors and other staff members as possible to live on and around campus to create a more-vibrant learning environment outside the classroom.
National studies show that on-campus students generally get better grades, are more involved and graduate more quickly than those living off-campus.
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Sorry if I didn’t explain it clearly. Married or soon to be married students will not and have never been limited by any of the houses rules of student living. I just meant that there is university owned living spaces for these students if they want that sort of thing. Most do because it’s cheap and a lot of them are international students.
Ah. Gotcha.
Nevermind then.
Age isn’t. Price and lifestyle are. Those can be correlated with age, but price and lifestyle are the real issues. I knew people off campus paying under $225/mo. for their shares of the rent. That’s not just cheaper than the dorms, it’s a lot cheaper.
There are, but they also charge more. Just because something’s higher quality doesn’t mean it’s better value.
I think you’re being a little overoptimistic in your expectations. You think forcing the sophomores back onto campus will force the UD landlords to invest in renovations? My guess is that the effect will be nearly the opposite. The most likely source of new business for landlords losing a portion of the campus business will be from non-student residents of nearby neighborhoods. That means the East Side. The University District will shrink by a couple of blocks on its eastern periphery, reflecting the atrophy of the private housing market centered around the university; the contiguous neighborhoods will fill in the gap. That means Weinland Park, northwestern Milo-Grogan, and the Fairgrounds area, primarily.
Those are not graduate student, recent grad, or young professional areas, nor is it a realistic possibility that they will become so within the next decade, save for perhaps southern areas of Weinland Park that are currently adjacent to the Short North and will not be losing campus business because that area already has very little campus business.
Age isn’t. Price and lifestyle are. Those can be correlated with age, but price and lifestyle are the real issues. I knew people off campus paying under $225/mo. for their shares of the rent. That’s not just cheaper than the dorms, it’s a lot cheaper.
.
I know people paying $150-$180 a month in rent around the OSU campus.
I’m not surprised. The people I knew in the <$225 range weren’t in the worst places one could have found.
The private market really does offer pretty much every realistic price point (and some unrealistic ones) within at least a short COTA ride of the OSU campus, as well as a broad variety of houses and complexes (in small, medium, large, and Hoggy’s versions), distances, and directions from the school.
If I were a budget-rental landlord, I’d actually try to be fairly student-friendly. Students can party a lot and might tear a place up a little bit, but you can get at least a good bit of that back from their security deposit, and the landlords know which houses are perennial “party houses” and don’t bother fixing them up with expensive & fragile upgrades. However, students are not, by and large, the source of crime problems … those come primarily from off-campus sources, and it always really irritated those of us with a stake in the image of the university that the media seldom bothered to distinguish between them and us.
But we’ll be married. We don’t WANT to live next to campus. We WANT to live in the Short North. We can afford to live in the SN.
I dislike the limitations very much, and think it sucks that people will have to go through that.
Most schools will have exceptions for non-traditional students. You can’t expect someone who is older and earns more than most of those teaching them to live in the dorms :)
Maybe I should further explain my thought process, so there is no misunderstanding. Do I expect UD to become the next Short North or German Village, priced away from affordability? No, and I don’t want that. As many as have said, there are a variety of price points around the city its great.
I think it is horrible that a landlord takes a property, a single family house, carves it into a duplex and further divides that into 3-4 apartments on each side. Then charges 400-500 for each apartment, barely shows up to take care of issues or hold his tenets responsible for damage. I am all for capitalism and the free market, but responsibility has to play a role.
Students rent so they have no investment to maintain the property and usually no understanding of their rights and responsibilities as a tenet. If the landlord is frequently absent or neglectful of the property, it reflects in the students use and treatment of the spaces. Thus the party houses, beer cans on the lawn Sunday morning and a generally bad image reflected on our students and the University through the media and local perceptions.
Some change in this dynamic, a change in the market, that will have landlords reevaluating their properties and making them more appealing to the broader market would go a long way to improving the area. There have been some redevelopment at the South Campus Gateway and on Lane and High, but its window dressing to the larger area. In such a vibrant corridor of Columbus, do we really want someone going from the Short North/Downtown to SoHud/Clintonville through the Central and Southern portions of Campus? How does that reflect on our community? Compare the North Campus area to that central and southern area and there is a pretty large difference. Much more mixed income and owner-occupied to rental housing that creates a pretty decent neighborhood.
I think OSU has a lot of potential to really help the students become better and more engaged citizens of Columbus. Some things I would love to see the university do:
-all Freshman and Sophomores in dorms. Married and other non-traditional students excepted. All freshman and sophomores living on campus should be banned from having a car (not uncommon on many university campuses) unless a medical or work related issue is involved.
-more pedestrian friendly campus, to the point of heavily restricting cars in the central portion. Having students dropped off at the front door of their classroom by a friend or significant other needs to stop. They should also consider a new pricing structure for parking passes with a modified congestion pricing. Anyone in a given radius would pay a surcharge (medical exceptions, once again).
-service requirements for all students enrolled at OSU. 8-10 hours a month working in the community. This could be litter cleanups, tutoring at local schools or libraries, serving the homeless or other projects.
-life-learning programs. Freshman and sophomores living on campus would be required to take workshops through the 2 years on things like: personal finances, household finances, nutrition and cooking
-in relation to pedestrian friendly campus, increase car share program to include off campus areas in co-ordination with the city.
I admit that I get uneasy, too, when landlords subdivide properties. However, part of that was inevitable simply given reductions in household size over the past hundred years; this is something that affects rental properties across the entire country, not just near universities. In fact, universities are among the last places where there’s any market for an 8-bedroom rental at all, because the college lifestyle tends to bring groups of people together willing to split rent eight ways and live together like that–people moving away from their hometowns looking to form new social circles, etc. Arrangements like that are pretty uncommon outside of the undergrad experience. Subdivision can make sense. (That said, I’m obviously a lot happier about seeing previously subdivided houses reconsolidated in Victorian Village than I am seeing them divided on campus, so I won’t really push this point. Just offering some perspective.)
When a landlord does subdivide a property like that, he’s going to have a hard time charging $400-500/month for it, at least for one bedroom. For two bedrooms, $500/mo. is hardly outrageous, even with somewhat substandard service (though obviously it would help if more students showed up at the free renters’ rights seminars the university holds from time to time).
All renters, not just students, have no investment to maintain in their properties; to really do away with this phenomenon, you’d have to ban renting a residence entirely, across the entire country. Needless to say, that’s unlikely.
I’ll have to say, despite the fact that I lived four years in the dorms, I never saw much purpose to even the first-year residency requirement. And I’ll say it was really nice having my car on campus all four years. Made going home on the weekends easier and eased the transition to college.
With respect to your idea about making central campus “less car-friendly” … are you aware of what it’s restricted to now? Most buildings are essentially inaccessible by car without a faculty permit or loading-zone pass. Certainly that’s true of the vast majority of central campus classroom buildings. You’d have trouble getting dropped off by a significant other. Cars are already heavily restricted on central campus, and the few students who are allowed to purchase central campus passes at all (RA’s, for example) still have to pay a small fortune to do so.
I fully support what you call “life learning programs,” but I think you should take heart at this: the First-Year Experience office at OSU started offering little informal seminars in the evenings at residence halls. Most residence halls have a little common area, so they planned to just be nomads and take their traveling show about personal finance, credit management, etc. to the different residence halls, camp out in the common room, give their spiel, and move on. Turnout was so massive that they needed to move into bigger venues. They were just starting to make the program a more formal initiative when I left OSU in 2004. I’m guessing it’s become much bigger by now. The seeds of a bigger program were certainly there. This is something that you shouldn’t have to make mandatory. All you have to do is make it convenient. They’ll come.
Actually, it is quite easy to drop people off and drive through central campus. I saw it all the time just last year when I was on Campus. Heck, I was carpooling some of our team to the ice rink this season and routinely picking them up in their dorms.
Some of the apartments I looked at this year, 1 bedrooms, in UD were 400-500 exactly as I described. Subdivided houses, narrow hallways, 3 room apartments with massive gaps of light coming between the doors.
Another great example of a university area, I one I drive through quite a bit, is the Capital area in Bexley. I don’t know what the exact numbers are, but I know its freshman and sophomores in dorms. Driving through the immediate area, you would never peg it as a student neighborhood. With a mix of housing, both rental and owner-occupied, you get much better care and investment in the area.
I fully support what you call “life learning programs,” but I think you should take heart at this: the First-Year Experience office at OSU started offering little informal seminars…
These sessions are now required for first year students to pass their Survey class.
[url]http://www.fye.osu.edu/registration/ss.html[/url]
Good to hear.
With credit card and other debt so rampant amongst college age students, any amount of education can go a long way to preventing that.
-service requirements for all students enrolled at OSU. 8-10 hours a month working in the community. This could be litter cleanups, tutoring at local schools or libraries, serving the homeless or other projects.
Students coming to OSU are here to do a job and that is attend class and get a quality education to better their life. This is a lot of work in it’s own right so requiring them to do something outside of that seems greedy by the residents of the city that just happen to be in the same location as the University.
Not to mention that, per capita, undergraduate students have some of the highest public service participation rates of any demographic in the country not preselected for the characteristic (i.e., members of service organizations).
Funny that despite all this work, I see quite a few coming out of the bars Friday and Saturday night. :roll:
I think requiring some amount of service like picking up trash in the immediate neighborhood where the students live, reading to children or tutoring at one of the schools or libraries or helping one of the local churches goes a long way to promoting social responsibility and really connecting the students to the surrounding community. A few hours a week is not all that much to ask when you consider the general X-box and facebook time used during a week.
better yet lets just cancel fun :roll:
I’m just throwing out suggestions. I am student myself.
I never said anything like take away all the fun. But to tell me that students have this vast workload to do and 2 hours or so of service is going to require so much out of them is ridiculous. Especially when the weekend seems to start on Thursday around campus.
My general point is that OSU takes a lot of flak from the community in general. A lot of the comments against the street car in various mediums was directed towards OSU and the perception of the city catering to the students. Look at Craigslist and you’ll see a varying degree of the OSU hate because of some drunken idiots in and around the UD or one athlete being arrested.
It would be great if OSU could help guide students to become better citizens and more active within their communities. Having the better part of 40-50k students go pick up the trash and litter they help create would make them realize the impact of their actions. Not having a heavily congested area and one more conducive to pedestrian, bicycle and transit traffic would go a long way to improving quality of life in that part of Columbus.
I think OSU does enough to try to encourage Hippy-ism in their students. as long as pot is still smoked in college things are fine, no need to push the whole hippy commune living experience another year.
If any 18yo cheerleaders need a free place to stay instead of the dorms, just let me know.
FREE LIQOUR INCLUDED.
^^^
That is one way to do it…
1. most OSU students drive their cars around because they are afraid to ride the COTA. I tell my friends that I ride and they are shocked and tell me to “be careful”
2. I don’t think that the students should be required to do community services, because then what are the over achievers going to do? :lol:
but really, I just started a job, and with a job + school, I have no time to do much else.
3. also, there are slacking kids everywhere. there are the go get ‘em students as well. it follows the bell curve like everything else in life.
categorizing the OSU student population as a whole is a gross over generalization.
that said, I am a sophomore living in the dorms this year and I do not feel robbed. there is going to be enough time for me to figure out how to pay rent, buy/make foods, and be grown up when I live off campus.