This year, Brown’s housing fees have seen a surprising change — and it’s not the price increase, silly; I said “surprising.” Next year, many rooms in Vartan Gregorian Quad will no longer require the infamous suite fee. While lovely for the future residents of New Dorm, this shift points out a simple but upsetting fact: Despite offering vastly different amenities, all dorms are divided into only two price categories. As the changes in New Dorm’s fees demonstrate, the suite-or-standard binary does not account for the range of existing facilities.
Setting aside the issue of deciding precisely what constitutes a suite, each price category encompasses vastly different living arrangements. Some dorms are farther away from campus resources than others. Some have been renovated recently while others have been ignored for years. Some are places people look forward to living and others are legendary sources of dread. In short, some dorms have less value than others. When it comes to on-campus housing, some of us are not getting what we’re paying for (if, indeed, any one of us is). In an ideal world, the University would be able to ensure that all dorms are equally maintained and create an egalitarian residential utopia. This is unrealistic. Fortunately, there is a much more practical alternative: creating a more nuanced pricing system that better accounts for the disparities in on-campus housing.
Despite my earlier grousing about the housing price hike for next year, I understand that the University needs to raise a certain amount of money from housing fees each year. I want the University to continue existing and understand that fees are a critical part of the balancing act this requires. My complaint is that this financial burden is currently distributed indiscriminately.
Imagine if, instead of being University-owned, all residence halls were private properties. It would be a logistical nightmare, of course, but there is no way that a room in Perkins would cost as much as one in 315 Thayer. The difference would be on the order of several hundred dollars per semester. While I don’t think that the housing situation would be better in a hypothetical capitalist wet dream, this thought experiment points to a critical flaw with the current billing scheme. In a fairer system, above-average rooms would command higher prices while less desirable ones would be cheaper. The occupants of Brown’s shadier residence halls are currently getting a far worse deal than their better-situated classmates.
While not devoid of problems, a more complicated system based on interest in various rooms would create prices that better reflect the quality of life provided by University housing. Even having four tiers (A, B, C, NC?) ranging from tricked-out apartments at one end to isolated, neglected husks like Perkins at the bottom, would reduce the unfairness of the current system. Rooms could be sorted based on historical housing lottery data: Rooms that consistently fill up toward the end of the lottery should be cheaper than those that get snapped up immediately. This would give an objective method for comparing different dorms without needing to account for the individual factors that make some dorms better than others.
The current pricing system does have one major strength: simplicity. If you’re living on campus, you only have to make one price-dependent choice: whether you and your three friends think having a private kitchen and a living room for a year is worth a 2005 Ford Focus with an iPhone 6s and $132 in the glove compartment (according to the most recent available data, suite fee for 4: $4,832. Ford focus: $4,500. iPhone 6s: $200 with an AT&T contract). Giving students only two price options streamlines the selection process, makes ResLife’s job easier and helps us not to think about the amount of money we’re spending on housing.
This simplicity comes at a price. The two-category system is so straightforward because it disregards important qualities that should be factored into dorm prices. It would also be simple to have a flat tax system, but I believe that this simplicity would result in an unfair distribution of financial burden. The housing price system is similar: We are sacrificing effectiveness for ease. But having all rooms priced individually would be too much of a shift in the other direction. Such a system would be highly impractical. I think that there is a sweet spot between having two price categories and having complete price mobility where we achieve the best balance between fairness and simplicity. I think the optimal number of categories would be around four.
Another problem with adding price categories is the potential to create socioeconomic stratification in campus housing. Many people would consciously choose to live in less desirable dorms if it would save them a significant amount of money, while others could use their financial advantages to secure better housing. Such dynamics are already a part of housing assignments. The current suite fee is prohibitively expensive for some people but not for others, allowing wealthier people to pay more for better housing. Extending the current housing price system to include more categories would not fundamentally change this. If anything, it would blur the boundary by adding intermediate options. Most importantly, it would give people better control over their personal finances.
The two-category housing fee system imposes an unfairly high rate on the residents of less desirable dorms and completely ignores many factors that influence the value of a particular room. A more nuanced approach would allow people more control over their housing fees and improve the overall fairness of the housing lottery by adding a silver lining to second-rate dorms. The University should add more price categories to account for the variation in on-campus housing quality and allow students a greater degree of financial choice.
Avery Rock ’18 can be reached at avery_rock@brown.edu. Please send responses to this opinion to letters@browndailyherald.com and other op-eds to opinions@browndailyherald.com.
