When I took a visit to Washington, D.C., last semester, I stayed in my friend Laura's residence hall for the weekend. It was a single-occupancy room, custom-equipped with a bed, an old, mahogany desk, a sink, an open closet that was large enough to house Laura's favorite half-dozen pairs of shoes, and just enough floor space for my small sleeping bag.
The communal bathroom and showers were down the hall and to the left.
Laura attends George Washington University, the most expensive institution of higher learning in the country, according to a CNN poll conducted in 2007. With tuition inching above $40,000 at GWU, she spent her freshman year living in space-efficient residence halls that were likely built in the 1970s.
Despite her school’s eye-popping price tag, Laura lived like a pauper, gaining an increasingly elusive awareness of what it's like to live in that oft-cited, nebulous “real world.”
But college is supposed to do that for us. Prepare us for the uninviting world of mortgages, job hunting and living, more often than not, paycheck to paycheck.
So it seems incongruous that, amid a great economic crisis, ASU has ambitiously erected what The Arizona Republic reported to be “the largest, most comprehensive honors college campus” in the country.
Decked out with a 20,000-square foot dining hall (baby grand piano included), five courtyards, an amphitheater, single-occupancy rooms equipped with full-sized beds and bathrooms that would make Holiday Inn blush, the new Barrett residence hall, that opened last week, is a world apart from most traditional college housing options.
The era of community showers and small rooms demanding your most creative arrangement of furniture is slowly waning away. Make way for enough space to fit your plasma TVs, your not-so-mini fridges and your giant inflatable bean bag chairs. Manzanita may be the last refuge for those seeking harsh conditions, but ASU even has plans to completely renovate the iconic throwback residence hall to make the rooms more spacious and comfortable.
Walking around the seemingly self-sustaining Barrett complex last week, I felt it was more reminiscent of the Palace of Versailles than a place where pimpled teenage college students call home. There’s a garden, a coffee shop, an every-need fitness center, Oxford-style study rooms and a recreation room the size of Bill Gates’ basement.
With such comfortable living, who would want to leave college and downgrade by stepping into the real world?
We are already a generation of entitlement. With personal palaces as residence halls, what’s to keep us from expecting mansions to be waiting behind our shiny diplomas upon graduation?
Isn’t it that kind of thinking — the “why not have it all?” mindset — that got us into such a catastrophic financial crisis in the first place?
I've been around Barrett’s new campus-within-a-campus a few times now, and I've heard the residents joke that they’re living in Harry Potter's fantastical Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Despite enough room for it, there are no quidditch games to be seen and certainly no magic wand duels lighting up the amphitheater late at night.
But living in the new Barrett lap of luxury may provide an equally immersing escape from reality. And I'm not so sure that's a good thing.
Reach the reporter at dustin.volz@asu.edu.
