You Thought Dorm Rooms Smelled Bad Before

June 6, 2010 2:59 PM

So your parents gave you a puppy when you were 10 years old. Now you are graduating and feel condemned to going to a local school and spending the next four years living with your parents because you can't leave Lassie behind. Think again. Colleges are are going beyond the traditional use of dogs as mascots.
posted by Xurando (35 comments total)

My college career wouldn't have been half as anxiety-inducing if I could have brought my cat. I wish I could go back in time and attend a college that allowed pets in the dorms.

(Is it wrong that this makes me grin because it reminds me of Hogwarts?)
posted by tzikeh at 3:05 PM on June 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

Now you are graduating and feel condemned to going to a local school

"Condemned"? Really?

WTF.

For undergrad work, many state schools offer great educations that won't sink you $200k in debt.

But hey, feel free to blow your money on Harvard. Six months after your first job it won't make any difference, but in getting that critical fresh-grad position, the extra $160k you blew might just give you the edge.
posted by pla at 3:08 PM on June 6, 2010

> But hey, feel free to blow your money on Harvard.

70% of Harvard students receive financial aid. You're missing the point, anyway. Say I want to get a particular kind of engineering school but the local or nearby state U doesn't have the kind of program that really floats my boat like the one on the opposite side of the country. It's really not a binary question of either most expensive school or basement quality local college.

At any rate, many students move off campus after their first or second year and can have all the pets they want then.
posted by Burhanistan at 3:26 PM on June 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

This seems cruel to the pets.
posted by ifandonlyif at 3:34 PM on June 6, 2010 [4 favorites]

Besides, the article doesn't mention "colleges" it mentions one smaller women's college that is doing this. Scale pet ownership up to a 50k student state university and you'll see all kinds of untoward issues that probably would make it a non-starter.
posted by Burhanistan at 3:37 PM on June 6, 2010

Cool, more things for the frat boys shave, write obscene things on with Magic Markers, and feed bong smoke to!
posted by turgid dahlia at 3:43 PM on June 6, 2010 [2 favorites]

I had a friend in high school who adopted a rabbit from a shelter. She'd let it shit all over her dorm room floor and leave it alone for days at a time when she went out of town, so by the time she got found out by an RA and had to bring it back to the shelter, it was semi-feral and dirty. But I'm sure the rest of these 18-year-old kids are totally capable of caring for another living being.
posted by oinopaponton at 3:51 PM on June 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

Um, college. Not high school.
posted by oinopaponton at 3:51 PM on June 6, 2010

Burhanistan : 70% of Harvard students receive financial aid.

That doesn't mean much without saying how much financial aid... I technically received "financial aid" as well - and I won't complain that it paid for my books, but that amounts to a drop in the bucket compared to 50k a year.


You're missing the point, anyway. Say I want to get a particular kind of engineering school but the local or nearby state U doesn't have the kind of program that really floats my boat like the one on the opposite side of the country.

If you want a degree so specific only one decent college offers it in the country, you can quite likely get it paid for by one of the desperate-for-grads employers seeking that degree. That, or you have too high of an opinion of that specific degree's value - Does it really justify the cost to get it, or does that cost merely save you spending another two years getting a Masters to specialize off a base Bachelors (like bioinformatics as a popular current one)?


turgid dahlia : Cool, more things for the frat boys shave, write obscene things on with Magic Markers, and feed bong smoke to!

Hey, cats love weed. Dogs, they prefer the booze (though not on the scale of Frat boy liver abuse).
posted by pla at 3:53 PM on June 6, 2010

pla, what the hell are you even talking about?
posted by Burhanistan at 3:54 PM on June 6, 2010

New York Times college story template:

Faced with an ever-more-competitive admissions process, $SMALL LIBERAL ARTS SCHOOL is doing some $RADICALLY DIFFERENT BUT NOT REALLY THING. $SENIOR was saved from complete failure because of it. $PYSCHOLOGIST worries kids may be forever screwed up by it.
posted by l33tpolicywonk at 3:55 PM on June 6, 2010 [11 favorites]

But I'm sure the rest of these 18-year-old kids are totally capable of caring for another living being.

Um... yes. I would venture to say that most are. Especially a beloved pet.
posted by tzikeh at 4:07 PM on June 6, 2010

Dogs. Meh. Oscar Wilde brought his pet lobster to Oxford.
posted by IndigoJones at 4:11 PM on June 6, 2010 [2 favorites]

Oscar Wilde brought his pet lobster to Oxford.

James Garfield brought both Odie and Nermal (on two non-consecutive semesters).
posted by DU at 4:23 PM on June 6, 2010 [3 favorites]

Burhanistan : pla, what the hell are you even talking about?

Following on l33tpolicywonk's template joke, many "specialized" BS degrees amount to $BIG_SCHOOL_LOOKING_FOR_A_NICHE offering $COMMON_BS combined with $LESS_COMMON_MS into $UNIQUE_ULTRASPECIALIZED_BS.

Usually this just entails trimming the two years of liberal arts out of a traditional BS, with the addition of a watered down MS-nominal program of study. For example, bioinformatics = CS/stats BS + genetics MS. Pharmacognosy = botany BS + pharmacology or biochem eng MS. These often save you two or three years if you really want to work in a hyperspecialized field, and offer a fallback or two if that specialty falls out of favor (such as happened with pharmacognosy).
posted by pla at 4:32 PM on June 6, 2010

What's kind of messed up here is that work/study kids will be caring for the pets. So basically, the poor kids get to shovel the shit of the rich kids. However, since some people may find this a better alternative to other lousy work/study jobs, maybe it's not as classist as it sounds.
posted by Maias at 4:37 PM on June 6, 2010

Cats. Meh. Byron had a bear at Cambridge.
posted by marienbad at 4:38 PM on June 6, 2010

I've heard tell that Sir Gerald Nabarro has a pet prawn called Simon and you wouldn't call Sir Gerald a loony, would you? Furthermore, Dawn Palethorpe, the lady show jumper, had a Clam called Sir Stafford after the late Chancellor; Alan Bullock has two pikes, both called Norman, and the late, great Marcel Proust had an haddock!
posted by Sys Rq at 4:39 PM on June 6, 2010 [2 favorites]

But I'm sure the rest of these 18-year-old kids are totally capable of caring for another living being.

Um... yes. I would venture to say that most are. Especially a beloved pet.

maybe it's different down here in the south, but there are plenty of animals roaming the streets at the end of every school year. probably just shelter animals who thought they actually had a shot at finding a home, though, and not a beloved pet.
posted by msconduct at 4:45 PM on June 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

I lived in dorms that permitted cats throughout my undergraduate years. (Other animals like fish were of course fine too.) I liked it, overall, and rather miss it, although of course there were one or two cats (or owners) who weren't great neighbors. Some of these cats weren't family pets, but were rather pets that the students got after getting to college, so having a pet wasn't necessarily an issue of it being "harder and harder for students to leave home," and I certainly can't think of anyone who avoided meeting people at college because they had a pet. Cats aren't much of a replacement for socializing with humans.

I suspect dogs would be more challenging: louder, bigger, need to be walked regularly, and generally higher-upkeep. I'd have found living next to a bark-y dog much more annoying than living next to a neurotic cat.

This seems cruel to the pets.
...more things for the frat boys shave, write obscene things on with Magic Markers, and feed bong smoke to!

It depends. I'm completely sure some students are completely irresponsible and would be terrible pet owners - in a dorm or an off-campus apartment. However, the cats I lived with generally seemed pretty happy, and I never saw anyone shave them, write obscene things on them, etc. In the dorms where I lived, the cats were able to wander through the halls, rooms, and lounges. They weren't cooped up much (unless there was some specific reason to keep them in their room), and everyone on hall kept an eye out for them and knew how to treat them. Most of the cat owners had had cats before (or had brought their cats from home), and for those that hadn't, there were obviously other experienced pet owners near by to help out. Students registered their cats with the school, as well, and had to be fully vaccinated and spayed or neutered. There were policies in place to deal with problems caused by pets or pet owners. Of course, these dorms also had very tight-knit communities of 10-40 people per hall, and students generally stayed there for 4 years - often including summers - which made it easier to maintain a fairly consistent and cat-friendly environment. However, that sort of situation isn't all that common. Once you're talking about keeping an animal limited exclusively to a dorm room, and once you're talking about dogs rather than cats, yeah, I think it would be much harder (though not necessarily impossible, depending on the dog and the student) to keep a pet and treat it well.

But hey, feel free to blow your money on Harvard.

While I certainly agree that one shouldn't reflexively put down local schools, these days, many of the top schools have very good financial aid (meaning that $200,000 price tag doesn't reflect what a large majority of the students actually pay, and some (at Harvard, families making under $60k yearly) don't pay at all), and many better state schools are increasingly expensive (and don't always have much financial aid). The choice really isn't as clear as you make it. It's easy to go from one extreme (any non-Ivy degree is worthless) to the other (every college offers a completely equivalent program and has equivalent opportunities and resources, and pursuing your education will be equally easy at all, so college choice will make no difference in your potential career.) Neither is correct. And, of course, none of this has anything to do with pets in colleges.
posted by ubersturm at 4:57 PM on June 6, 2010

...maybe it's different down here in the south, but there are plenty of animals roaming the streets at the end of every school year.

Perhaps I'm unduly biased by my positive experiences, but it seems to me that an official pet policy - one where animals are registered, vaccinated, neutered/spayed, etc., and where there are policies in place for damage, mistreatment of animals, and so on - might result in pets that are actually better-treated than pets that are kept illegally in dorms or that kept in off-campus housing that is not subject to university regulations.
posted by ubersturm at 5:00 PM on June 6, 2010

My enspousenated one, el_lupino, professes at Washington & Jefferson (one of the schools mentioned in the story). They have a pet dorm, but pets are known to be more widespread than that on campus. It's a bit of an open secret. "There is only one pet dorm" |≠ "There is only one dorm with pets."

Here's the thing: Washington & Jefferson students are required to live on campus all four years, and I think that might be part of why this exists - because if students were living off-campus, many would likely acquire pets in those years.

Also, it fits the general tone of the place. The president of the college is an inveterate cat rescuer (as are we) and the last time we needed to round up a mama and her kittens, we borrowed a trap from her.
posted by jocelmeow at 5:19 PM on June 6, 2010

When I was in college, you couldn't have a pet in dorms (though I knew of more than one "secret" cat), but you could if you lived in a frat/sorority/co-ed organization. There were lots of dogs on campus, some of them came to class, and they all seemed to be happy and well-cared for.

Speaking of "blowing money on Harvard", you'd have to come from an extremely well-off family to pay full tuition and room/board, at which point I suspect affording it wouldn't be a problem. As a data point - I didn't go to Harvard - but my small private college offered me way, way more financial aid than my state u. did.

Under new financial aid guidelines, parents in families with incomes of less than $60,000 will no longer be expected to contribute any money to the cost of attending Harvard for their children, including room and board. Families with incomes in the $60,000 to $80,000 range contribute an amount of only a few thousand dollars a year. In December 2007, Harvard announced that families earning between $120,000 and $180,000 will only have to pay up to 10% of their annual household income towards tuition.[71]
posted by rtha at 5:37 PM on June 6, 2010

I worked at Stephens College when they started this program about five years ago. It's good to see that it's still going strong. The students love it, and certainly gives the school some good press.
posted by zsazsa at 5:37 PM on June 6, 2010

I went to the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences for a year and the housing on campus there was very dog-centric. We lived in large houses, seven-eight people in a house with our own rooms/bathrooms and large kitchens. Each mini-neighborhood had a hub with laundry...and dog showers! Since it was a country-ish area there was plenty of space for dog walking and many students had dogs. People took very good care of their dogs and since housing was so close to class they could come home for lunch and walk/feed them. I got the impression that college dogs in Sweden had it better than most dogs owned by adults in NYC.

The main problem was that SLU's male-female ratio was skewed towards the latter and many women seemed to have social lives consisting of hanging out with other women and their dogs. Such "dog parties" got tiresome after awhile and it almost seemed like the dogs were a (poor) stand-in for normal college social interactions. Some of the "dog girls" I was friends were were a drag because they never wanted to go to bars or to travel unless they could bring their dogs.
posted by melissam at 6:01 PM on June 6, 2010

In my experience with large state universities in the southeast, large dogs are widespread, so many students here strongly prefer to live off-campus. There's some anecdotal evidence that some students here are attending the local community college for their first year to avoid the (recent) requirement that university freshmen live on campus.

I can also corroborate msconduct's experience. When we were in Athens, Ga., as the student who lived across the street from us was pulling out of the driveway in a U-haul to move to Colorado, we asked him who owned the orange cat we'd seen coming and going from his house. "Uh . . . he's mine." What are you going to do with him? "Uh . . . I don't know." (15 years later, he's still with us.)

Dogs, they prefer the booze (though not on the scale of Frat boy liver abuse).
I don't know about that--when I was in school, you couldn't leave a glass of beer or whisky unattended at Jody's house because his dog would drink out of your glass if you weren't watching. Jaffee was quite literally a booze hound--he especially liked straight bourbon. (On the other hand, in some ways he was the most well-behaved dog I've ever met: if you told him "get," he would go into the bedroom and lie quietly on his dog bed.)
posted by fogovonslack at 6:22 PM on June 6, 2010

probably just shelter animals who thought they actually had a shot at finding a home, though, and not a beloved pet.... posted by msconduct

I wish, wish, wish that you were just being ironic, msconduct, but years of rescue work has taught me that you are right.
posted by tizzie at 7:00 PM on June 6, 2010

Harvard undergrad financial aid is pretty sweet. Wish to hell my state school had had something like that. I'm in more debt for having gone there than I would have been at a private school with a decent need-based program. (When I started undergrad, I had an EFC of... 0.)

As one of my law school issues is finding somewhere I can go where I can get and afford housing that will allow me to bring my cats, I definitely sympathize with this.

But having done apartment living, I have seen people treat their pets horribly, which makes me wonder if this is a good idea. I don't know. I've had one cat who was a rescue from a neighbor who moved without taking the cat, and another which was found wandering in an apartment complex. And so many people don't know how to keep litterboxes clean, don't know how to deal with cats who don't go where they're supposed to, etc, etc, and that causes serious maintenance issues. So I never know where to go with this. I want rentals to be cat-friendly, and I don't want to put down a huge deposit, but I know other people will cause major damage if that happens, and possibly abandon animals, and argh.
posted by gracedissolved at 7:14 PM on June 6, 2010

We had cats and other pets in college. I don't think dogs were allowed, or at least I don't remember seeing any. But I had a cat, and a bunch of other people did (and then of course pets like fish and so on). Dogs are a little tougher because of potential space & noise issues, not to say that all dogs would have that, but the odds are a lot higher than with cats. A small quiet dog (do those exist? :) ) could probably have been fine, a large dog couldn't really live in a student dorm room. The cats all wandered the student houses and were generally liked.
posted by wildcrdj at 7:18 PM on June 6, 2010

bears, meh. Kemal Ataturk brought an entire menagerie, all named Abdul.
posted by Herodios at 7:21 PM on June 6, 2010

I never had any pets growing up for a variety of reasons, but when I read:

Now you are graduating and feel condemned to going to a local school and spending the next four years living with your parents because you can't leave Lassie behind.

I thought, "Are people who grew up with pets really that much of a pussy?"
posted by MattMangels at 7:29 PM on June 6, 2010 [1 favorite]

But hey, feel free to blow your money on Harvard. Six months after your first job it won't make any difference...

This has really not been my experience. Graduating from Harvard is a gift that just keeps on giving, and I say that 11 years from my graduation date. As Rev. Gomes told us on our first day, heavily paraphrased by the 13 intervening years of memory loss: "You did it! You're here, you're going to Harvard. Enjoy it! Revel in it! Be proud of yourself! And for the rest of your life, you're going to be a Harvard alum." I switched career paths too, so you'd think the degree wouldn't be so valuable, since I don't employ any of the content on a regular basis. But no: it still matters to people, and people still want to know about it, and it still influences the way people interact with me. Whether that's worth 200K or not, I can't really say. (I didn't pay 200K, however: my school was cheap, a mere 14K a year, of which I paid $0.)

In the residence rooms/dorms I've lived in, I can only think of one that my cat would even consider tolerating for any length of time. And that was the room I had when I was a don. Dogs, I can see: dogs don't need much space really, if you walk them 3 or 4 times a day. But a cat? I guess s/he would get used to it, eventually.

And this:

“By having your pet there,” said Dr. Koplewicz, who is also president of the Child Mind Institute, “you could have an excuse not to go out and talk to people.” Dr. Koplewicz has clearly never had a dog. You never meet as many people as you do when you have to walk a dog a couple of times a day. Everyone wants to stop and chat when you have a sweet, adorable dog. Best thing for getting to know your neighbourhood/new neighbours! And it's not like a dog would even let you just sit inside all day. Imagine the whining! A dog will FORCE you out to interact with your peers!
posted by Hildegarde at 7:36 PM on June 6, 2010

If you want a degree so specific only one decent college offers it in the country,

Wait, what.

I had to transfer out of state to do the degree that I wanted. My state university didn't have a decent program. I couldn't stay unless I wanted a degree taught by people who weren't experts in the field and was made up of a hodge-podge of classes that sort of "fit" the topic, but didn't offer a coherent education in it.

My degree, linguistics, is hardly so specialized that only one decent college in the country offers it. I had a lot of choices--just none of them local.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:12 PM on June 6, 2010

I remember back when I was in High School (12 + years ago in a suburb of Phoenix, AZ) there was a series of rapes at one dorm building at ASU. IIRC one of the ways the school beefed up security at the time was allowing dogs in that particular dorm. I thought it was a nice idea at the time, but I don't know if they still allow them.
posted by TooFewShoes at 10:39 PM on June 6, 2010

Well, there goes walking barefoot on the quad.
posted by Auden at 4:41 AM on June 7, 2010