RESPONDING TO INCENTIVES.

Daniel Luzer looks at universities contracting out the operation of housing, and sees tradeoffs, some of which trouble him.

While the private dorms may not always be in the students’ best interests, it’s a relatively easy way for the colleges to get new buildings on the cheap.

The University of Kentucky, [New York Times reporter Ronda] Kaysen reports, is considering farming out all of its student housing Education Realty Trust, which would demolish most campus dormitories and replace them in a $500 million construction binge.

The treasurer of the institution, Angela Martin, said UK is considering moving forward because housing isn’t the university’s job. “They can build it cheaper,” Martin told Kaysen. “They can build it faster and they can operate it leaner than we can. This is not the university’s core business.”

Martin has a point; until recently most colleges didn’t have dormitories at all. Students either lived in fraternities and sororities or rented space in boarding houses in town.

But then, in the aftermath of World War II, colleges began to build residence halls. They did this because the vast increase in the student population during that period required the colleges to build affordable housing for them, or the students wouldn’t enroll.

So no, it’s not the university’s core business, but it is one of the things it currently does. It did this, originally, in order to keep costs down, for students. Kentucky can’t say the same thing about the development corporations.

There's a big difference between providing improved accommodation for returning G.I.s, many of whom made do with temporary quarters in Quonset huts at the land-grant colleges that were an improvement on tents on the field, or improving the accommodation to the standard of barracks or high-rise housing projects for the G.I.s children (the Baby Boom era dorms, which by today's standards are austere), or the recent housing, being built with the G.I.s grandchildren or great-grandchildren in mind.  There's such a project under way at Northern Illinois, built with the hope that additional students will come.  As must always be the case with new projects around here, there's a focus group that either rationalizes or makes the case for what is to come.  The list of preferred features doesn't include "keep it cheap", whether that's omitted by design, or whether it doesn't matter, I don't know.