An otherwise interesting Times story about tuition-free Berea College in Kentucky contains this pampered-college-student howler: “[U]nlike most well-endowed colleges, Berea has no football team, coed dorms, hot tubs or climbing walls.”
At least reporter Tamar Lewin is willing to consider football teams as a pricey amenity. But coed dorms? Are those somehow more expensive than the single-sex kind? And while I’ve heard of at least one college installing a climbing wall in its athletic center, no evidence is presented that “most” schools with large endowments have them, let alone hot tubs.
srah | 21-Jul-08 at 1:07 pm | Permalink
The University I Work At has a “leisure pool complete with spa” and a climbing wall. We are definitely not tuition-free, though.
Rachel | 21-Jul-08 at 10:49 pm | Permalink
What a coincidence! I emailed the reporter about that statement. This was her response:
You’re quite right, or course, about coed dorms not really costing more — and it did occur to me as I was writing it that it was apples and oranges: I justified it to myself as being a way of showing a fundamentally different headset than most of other wealthy colleges — but I should have know that a sharp reader would wonder, correctly, what it was doing there.
Thanks for writing.
Young Urban Amateur | 22-Jul-08 at 4:32 pm | Permalink
I don’t even understand–I mean, what colleges *don’t* have co-ed dorms? She’s probably talking about co-ed by room (or even co-ed by roommate, which is limited to a handful of obscure, coastal, patchouli-drenched communist liberal-arts colleges [NOTE: SARCASM, HUMOR])
Even so, I have to say that the co-ed-ness of the co-ed-by room dorm I lived in was of almost no benefit to me whatsoever. There was a pretty girl down the hall I got to walk by a couple times a week, I guess. Is that really different from co-ed by floor? No, not really.
But if Berea really does have no co-ed dorms whatsoever, that certainly does distinguish it from other colleges.
Young Urban Amateur | 22-Jul-08 at 4:34 pm | Permalink
Also, let’s not even get started on the gender-essentializing inherent in the bias against co-ed dormitories. Zing.