Learning how to think for ourselves

By Molly Ball

Last year, Yale Tuition went up 3 percent, while room and board went up 5.5 percent. This is the first time in several years that the University has let a cost-of-living increase dwarf that year's rise in tuition. It's a sign that Yale is beginning to treat its students as adult human beings. But there's still a long way to go.

Throughout the 1990s, Yale has hiked tuition to keep room and board increases small. During this decade, the University has faced a bottomed-out New Haven rental market with increasing numbers of students moving out of the dorms; the disproportion between tuition and room-and-board increases, as Yale itself admitted, was an effort to make living on campus about as affordable as moving off school grounds.

Yale's sentiment seemed noble: to maintain the residential college community. That was also the idea behind adding the on-campus requirement for sophomore year in 1995. But even in 1995, students were being annexed. Yale would argue that it continued to fill its dorms past capacity because it feared the colleges might eventually empty out completely. But the fact that the University would rather have its students rent from Yale than escape Yale altogether illustrates that "college togetherness" was basically just lip service.

Last year's housing shuffle showed that Yale created a monster by requiring students to stay on campus. The crunch caused a massive reorganization of Old Campus and large-scale annexation. We can only hope it provided Yale with the impetus to reconsider its reckless requirement. Now, it seems getting rid of the sophomore-year rule would advantage Yale—but it would also give students immense liberty and dignity.

There are pernicious consequences to Yale's insistence that students remain tethered to their dorm rooms. By bribing students to stay within its confines, Yale encouraged us to remain children (or, judging from the condition of some of the rooms, animals). If you like conspiracy theories, it looks a little like The Man was trying to keep us all under his thumb.

Living on campus is like a drug, keeping you just a few levels removed from the real world. Living off campus involves responsibility: haggling with utility companies, landlords, and supers; grocery shopping and cooking; cleaning. Living in your cozy college, you might, in four years, never have to deal with these hurdles. Your parents pay the bursar bill every month—laden as it is with phone charges and Durfee snacks—not to mention your rent and food costs. After you graduate, if you don't move back in with your parents, the real world could conceivably come as a rude shock.

This is a worst-case scenario, and that's the point: most of us will encounter considerably more independence before we leave school, usually in the form of summers away from home or terms spent abroad. Coming back to school and living in the dorms is like returning to childhood. Someone else cooks your meals (and tells you when to eat them). Someone else cleans your bathroom (which you have to leave your room to use). Someone else makes sure the water, heat, and electricity are turned on (dictating meanwhile what appliances you can use and how warm your room is). And you remain dependent on the institution that feeds you.

It's still possible to live off-campus more cheaply than on, barely. Somehow, in noting that Yale managed to keep its tuition increase remarkably low from last year to this, no one seemed to notice that room and board rose more than tuition for the first time in a decade. Maybe Yale just decided it looked better for tuition not to skyrocket than for room and board to hover artificially at market rates (thus penalizing the determinedly independent). Or maybe Yale simply loosened its belt due to an upswing in the rental market.

Then again, maybe Yale really wants to acknowledge our status as people with a modicum of free will and common sense. Maybe the University really intended to stop bribing us to dwell in its confines. And maybe, just maybe, it's willing to take another step and revoke the ill-conceived 1995 rule.

The regulation forcing sophomores to live on campus denies us the choice of whether or not we want to participate in the college community, which, if it is such a wonderful thing, shouldn't need shackles to tie us to it. Yale has finally given up trying to lure us with money. Now, if Yale really trusts us, it will let us think for ourselves.

Molly Ball is a junior in Pierson.

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