Dirty carpets. Gum under library desks and chairs. Broken water systems with hot water that comes and goes. These are only some of the things that I have observed at my school.
I was always told about how dirty college would be, but I never really believed it.
It wasn't until I got to college that I started to believe how bad living conditions can be for students, and with the immense amount of tuition my family and I will be paying .. I think the living conditions should be more than desirable.
I walk on top of the dirty carpets in my residence hall every day, I look at all the stains and the crumbs and wonder how many classes of students walked on top of them and how long it is has been since they have been deep cleaned.
Every Monday I see them cleaned - well, vacuumed - but I really wish I could see them scrubbed.
Some say I'm feeding into my OCD tendencies when I think these things, and while that is probably true, shouldn't I at least have a clean residence hall when I'm paying so much money to live here?
The elevators are nasty. They look like they haven't been wiped down in forever. The tiles of the floor are black and have a chalky residue when you step on them.
One day I saw someone spill their spaghetti on the elevator door and the sauce that was dripping down the door wasn't cleaned up for a week.
The amount of Juul pods that students throw into the lights in the elevator grow every day. While it is entertaining to watch the number of pods grow every day and think about the nicotine addiction that plagues my generation, it is also pretty gross.
College has made me clean my entire apartment weekly. I have to scrub everything - from door handles, light switches, even to the floor, I can't stand feeling grimy in the place that I'm supposed to call home.
The water temperature and pressure fluctuates, I remember at the beginning of the spring semester after winter break concluded my friends and I were furious because we hadn't had hot water in our showers in weeks. I try not to view this as a first class problem, but again, this isn't about living conditions at the end of the day, it's about paying thousands of dollars to live in shit.
The study lounges in the residence halls are a mess. The carpets are dirty (who's surprised), the couches are old and so small you can barely fit on them, and the tables are cut up and have years worth of paint from art students working on them. The couches are ripped up half of the time, and it just seems all too run down.
With the amount of money every student is paying to live in these facilities, why haven't things changed? Why isn't new furniture put into the lounges and dorms? Where is all of our money going?
However, this isn't the same for just my residence hall. I've been in others - the honors dormitory for example - and they're just as bad. Water damage breaks the carpets and makes them rise off the floor, they're not glued down or repaired, they stay that way.
Students pay so much for housing already, the living conditions should be phenomenal. The only dorm nobody really has complaints about is the luxury apartment building that is almost $12-$14k an academic year.
I don't think I, and other students, are asking too much to have adequate living conditions.
Not to mention how much money goes into student-athlete facilities and their state of the art lounges, while the students who work hard to be at school and have no other choice but to live in dorms don't get a great deal.
Dorm life is the issue - the school facilities, classrooms, workplaces, are all well kept, tidy, and clean. I've never encountered any issue with the cleanliness of my University other than in dormitories.
I'm not asking for change, I'm not asking to be living first class, I'm writing to raise awareness on behalf of all students that have had complaints about dorm life.
