When I was in college in the eighties I rented a large two bedroom apartment and cooked my own food for two thirds of what it would have cost to live in the dorms.
Add in a room mate part of the time and it was cheaper still.
During that time, Oklahoma State University shut down several large dorms for lack of occupancy.
What do you suppose might have caused people to not live in the dorms?
It didn’t take long for the late boomer gang to work through the system like a chicken through a snake. In the 70s after Vietnam most of the dorms were just about standing room only and they were even forced to open some of the older ones like Parker. Life in the newer dorms was a small two person room, a hotplate for weekends, popcorn maker maybe, no fridge, two closets, a built in chest, two square desks, two beds, lots of storage over the closets, communal bathroom and two formals rooms we could set up a ping pong table in.
Most of us who had serious degree programs got plenty of exercise walking to class. Never had much time for intramural sports or the recreation facility. I was too busy going to class and working my way through school. I moved out of the dorms after two years, rented a small house with a roommate and my grades improved markedly. We were now grown up and very serious about school and career foundation.
I made it on less than $200 a month plus tuition and books back then. Having $10 extra was a huge deal and I could actually go on sort of a date. I also was able to borrow money from Dad to buy a basic four function calculator since the slide rule was just not fast enough. We called the basic calculator a “four banger” it was made by Casio and it cost $125.00. The high end ones did square roots and logs and were the HP21 but they were just far too expensive for me so I made do with the four banger and log and trig tables for almost two years. I managed to land a nice Christmas Break job welding fence and earned enough money to buy a SR-50 I believe it was.
Gasoline was almost 30 cents a gallon and you could not get it on weekends most places so you had to budget and plan the 180 mile trip home and hope someone did not break the lock on the fuel tank in the truck in the parking lot and steal your gas. It was a long trip home at the nationally mandated 55 mph.
I considered myself acceptably well off. Other kids I went to high school with went to work or a local JUCO then on to a regional college and not the big state university. None of us went to anything but a state school or even thought about anything else. Other people went to name schools, private schools or Ivy League. Out of state tuition was for rich people, very rich people.
The advent of the guaranteed student loan has caused a lot of foolish people to spend a lot of money they don’t have foolishly. We did what we did and lived like we lived because we had little other choice and we all did it so nobody felt deprived. We also did it because our parents did it after the war and felt very fortunate. I know I could not wait to go home to great cooking, a quiet place to sleep and no crowds of people when we got a break. And it was a break from a very intense lifestyle of work, learning and deadlines. Somehow, with all the 18 to 21 hour semesters I managed to graduate with an engineering degree and good enough grades to start work with Exxon.
My how things have changed in 40 years. Again.
It was $7/semester to not have a dorm mate. After having a doper slut (think T. Cullen Davis crowd hookers) my first summer, a ding bat salutatorian who was on a free ride scholarship but cried over bf back home so left two weeks into the first fall semester and another ding bat who cooed like a dove 24/7 first spring semester, I gladly paid that ridiculously hilarious $7.