Anyone who has ever lived in on-campus housing can agree that there are quite a few downfalls to it. Sure there are some obvious advantages like the fact that you're on campus and never have to worry about traffic. Or that having a roommate can be really great as long as you get along with them. But a lot of the time, the negatives seem to outweigh the positives. Especially when you consider how much we pay to be living on campus.

1. The bathrooms are gross

This mostly applies if you live somewhere with corridor style rather than suite style rooms. Suite bathrooms are, in my experience, much cleaner because there are fewer people using it. I hate basically everything about the bathrooms in the building I live in right now. There's a combination lock on it, the main door ALWAYS slams shut, the showers are always disgusting because people leave clumps of hair everywhere, and there's always someone singing loudly and off-key in the shower.

2. The food sucks

This is my seventh year living in a dorm and the food hasn't always been terrible. Especially compared to the food on campus now, the food at my boarding school was the best thing ever. Even if the food on campus this year hadn't gone drastically downhill in quality and had a dramatic price increase, campus food usually isn't the best. Realistically there's nothing that can beat a nice home cooked meal.

3. The beds aren't great

You get used to it after a while, but dorm beds are pretty crappy. I've got a three-inch thick mattress pad on my bed right now and I still wake up with my back hurting. Not even having a mountain of pillows can make it truly comfortable. I don't really know how this could be solved behind just buying new mattresses for everyone, but I'm sure they would seriously overcharge us for it.

4. No air conditioning

Especially in the eastern United States, there's this horrible thing called humidity which makes everything feel gross, sticky, and damp. Not having air conditioning in the dorms at the beginning of the fall semester and the end of the spring semester means that you're either going to sleep or waking up feeling like you need to shower immediately. Humidity = sweat and sweat = being sticky all day. Not even having a fan in your room helps that much because it really just ends up moving the hot air around.

Like I said earlier, it's not all bad. But some of this is just too much. I know living on campus could be considered a privilege considering the crazy long wait list that never seems to shrink, but I'm not entirely sure that people realize what they're getting themselves into when they decide to live on campus.