Grad student housing squeeze likely to last
Graduate students forced to deal with outdated electrical outlets, bursting pipes and snapping elevator cables count themselves lucky: At least they are able to live on campus.Despite a rising demand for on-campus housing among graduate students, the supply of available space — most of which is dated and not renovated — has remained constant for decades. And the situation is not likely to change in the near future
#2
By (Anonymous)
4:01pm on November 15, 2007
HGS is the least of anyone's worries. Undergrads should get tours of Helen Hadley Hall, and maybe they'd quit whining about not being able to squeeze multiple couches into their suite's common room.
I don't understand why the university doesn't get their act together on grad student housing. The stuff offered by the university is in bad shape, generally poorly located, and you typically have to purchase a meal plan. Also, the market for apartments near campus is terrible: everything is overpriced and in poor condition. I know this is a sweeping generalization and there are exceptions to it, but it's fairly close to the general impression that us grad students here have. Even Harvard has over the past few decades invested significantly in university-owned apartments for graduate students.
What I think the university should do is embark on a building campaign of lots of gleaming new apartments for graduate students. There's plenty of open land near campus, such as university-owned surface parking lots. Also, why doesn't every new building have 5-10 floors of grad student apartments on top of it? The brand new sculpture building could have easily had housing on top of it, for example. Maybe the neighbors would object, saying it's out of the scale of the neighborhood, but then someone should tell them there's no better way to make their neighborhood more vibrant and more safe than by injecting hundreds of pedestrian-based intelligent young people into it.