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>In what way are dorms worse than personal homes for diseases anyway? Are they not trusting their students to prepare their own food? Why don't they just close

by kyeb 7y ago

>In what way are dorms worse than personal homes for diseases anyway? Are they not trusting their students to prepare their own food? Why don't they just close the dining halls instead? The dorms have shared bathrooms, often shared rooms with doubles, triples, and quads, and shared living spaces (lounges, study rooms, laundry, etc.) in addition to the dining halls. Moreover, in our dorms, we have effectively no way to eat if the dining halls close down. Since mine has a dining hall for us to eat, it has only one kitchen for the entire dorm, which is ~500 people. Edit: It's also worth pointing out that MIT students are at very low risk right now. Sending us all home before we're at a medium/high risk level is the right move, so students aren't bringing it home with them. Nobody on campus has tested positive yet (as far as we know), and once it reaches the campus it would spread like crazy. Better to preempt it and send us away now.

iokanuon 7y ago
>Moreover, in our dorms, we have effectively no way to eat if the dining halls close down. That sounds crazy to me, in Poland there's a multitude of cheap restaurants full of students close to every university campus. There's a big demand because universities are packed with students that don't cook for themselves. Why hasn't the same happened to the US then?
- CydeWeys 7y ago
  There are plenty of fast food places/corner stores/restaurants/groceries in Cambridge within walking distance of MIT dorms. So the "no way to eat" part is a bit dramatic.
  - kyeb 7y ago
    The closest grocery is Target in Central square, which is extremely limited or maybe Trader Joe's, which also isn't the same. The Star Market that was right behind campus closed a couple years ago. It's not so easy, in my opinion.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      That Target is less than a mile from all of campus, and a quarter mile from the closest dorms. That's easy walking distance. What am I missing?
      - porknubbins 7y ago
        I’ve seen like most of Boston on a bike share under an hour. There is zero reason students in a dense major city couldn’t buy groceries.
      - perennate 7y ago
        That Target barely has any groceries, it's a small general department store. But yeah there is Trader Joe's, H-Mart, and Whole Foods. Market Basket is a bit further but more like a real grocery.
        CydeWeys 7y ago
        Yeah, the point is there's a wealth of options for food within a an easy hour round trip of walking (not just specifically the one Target). And a lot more if you have access to a bike. People are not going to starve to death when the alternative is walking 15 minutes to a grocery store. Let's be real. Downtown Cambridge is NOT some food desert like what exists in other parts of the US, where you could walk for hours and not reach the nearest grocery store (this is particularly prevalent in rural areas).
        swader999 7y ago
        This is the point though, if things deteriorate none of these options will be viable.
        CydeWeys 7y ago
        They can't shut down the grocery stores for long periods of time for the simple fact that people will start starving to death, which has a mortality rate strictly worse than any pandemic disease. The only retail businesses still open in the worst-struck parts of China and Italy are the grocery stores and pharmacies, because they have to be open. They are essential. Some of my relatives are Italian and they have to book a specific time slot to go to the grocery store, and that and the pharmacy/doctor/hospital are the only things they can be on the roads to do. These options will continue to be viable unless society completely collapses, which doesn't seem in the cards here.
  - nemothekid 7y ago
    I don’t know how much dining hall food costs or if it’s prepaid but you are talking about eating out for every meal on a students budget. The point about bringing up the dining hall is they can’t go to the grocery store because they have no way to cook (and maybe even store) the food they bought.
    - perennate 7y ago
      Ha, the prices are at [1], the cheapest is around $13 per meal. Eating out can be much cheaper, and there are healthy options. [1] https://studentlife.mit.edu/dining/residential-dining/meal-plans https://studentlife.mit.edu/dining/residential-dining/meal-p...
      - kelnos 7y ago
        Meal plans are typically pre-paid at the beginning of the semester. So that money is already gone, and I would expect that eating out for every meal -- even at below $13/meal -- would be out of reach for a lot of students.
        CydeWeys 7y ago
        I'm expecting to see MIT refund some portion of the semester's food cost now that the dining halls will be shut down.
  - slg 7y ago
    There is "no way to eat [while remaining quarantined]". Dorms do not have private kitchens. They don't even have private sinks. I'm not familiar with MIT specifically, but the most you can usually hope for in the average American dorm room is a mini-fridge and a microwave. It would be incredibly difficult to expect a large number of people to live in those conditions for multiple weeks if quarantined.
    - CydeWeys 7y ago
      You're still allowed to go to the grocery store in China. It's one of the very few places you can still go. Same in Italy. Obviously starvation is a much surer death than coronavirus, hence governments are not literally starving people to death by disallowing them from even obtaining food.
      - slg 7y ago
        I was more focusing on the lack of facilities to prepare food. That limits what is available to students from the local grocery stores. Are we going to force these kids to basically eat cereal for every meal for a couple weeks? Do the local grocery stores have the stock of non-perishable and ready to eat foods to meet the needs of these students? Does every student have the funds to purchase this food out of pocket and outside of their meal plan? There are a lot of questions that aren't answered by just pointing to the local grocery store if the dining halls and local restaurants are no longer an option.
        CydeWeys 7y ago
        Sure, but the dining halls are being closed for the same reason as the dorms. If not for the coronavirus then neither closure would be happening. In other words, it's not like the dining halls are being closed and then as a consequence the dorms are being closed for lack of food options.
        slg 7y ago
        This whole chain of comments started out with the following prompt: >In what way are dorms worse than personal homes for diseases anyway? Are they not trusting their students to prepare their own food? Why don't they just close the dining halls instead? Dining halls are inherently a highly trafficked gathering of a large group of people. That is exactly the type of things people are being instructed to avoid. It is likely a losing effort to try to prevent the spread of the disease through a college campus while still running dining halls at normal service levels. And once the decision is made to close the dining halls, you have to look at other options to feed the students. There is no clear answer to that question due to the reasons outline in previous posts so the ultimate response is to just send people home.
- sincerely 7y ago
  A lot of american schools have mandatory meal plans for people who live in the school-run dorms (or at least for first-year students in dorms, which is most of the people in dorms)
- kortilla 7y ago
  A restaurant isn’t an improvement over a dining hall when it comes to exposure to crowds.
- otachack 7y ago
  Some college towns have cheap restaurants, not all of them do, though.
- kyeb 7y ago
  MIT is kind of a weird location. Cambridge and Boston are _very_ high cost of living. Plus, every dorm either has kitchens or a dining hall, so the food needs aren't super high typically.
- mackey 7y ago
  The US is a big place. Those exist in the US too, but MIT is in an area surrounded my software companies and pharmaceuticals. Not a lot of cheap options.
  - DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
    I used to work near MIT. At least several years ago, there were surprisingly few places to buy a decent meal near campus. (By surprising, I mean because there were also numerous businesses in that neighborhood with lots of well-paid employees.) The area also has/had a small number of food trucks at lunchtime (only) IIRC.
    - DonHopkins 7y ago
      If only we had a taco truck on every street corner.
    - htrp 7y ago
      Kendall has gotten super expensive .... the food trucks are also pretty much the same price as the restaurants for a meal
    - mackey 7y ago
      Yeah, I worked near MIT from 2008 to 2012. It's almost a completely different place now. There weren't a ton of options back then, you had the MIT foodcourt, Rebecca's cafe, a sandwich place that was also a convenient store above a dry cleaner, and maybe Sebastians, but at least they weren't super expensive. It doesn't even seem like the lunch options are better today, just more expensive. And dinner options, forget about it, way too expensive. We used to go to Tommy Doyles after playing corporate softball, and at least you could get a cheap burger.
      - DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
        Yeah, I've been to many of those places, also Chipotle quite a bit. One thing I disliked about grabbing lunch in the area was that it mostly seemed really expensive or unhealthful. I'm about average (I think) in terms of how healthful of a diet I try to have. But around Kendal Square it was hard to avoid crazy amounts of grease and salt in most of the meals. Okay for once in a while, but not every day.
- rsynnott 7y ago
  American universities are often basically in the middle of nowhere.
  - mauvehaus 7y ago
    MIT is most assuredly not: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Great+Dome/@42.3615,-71.1050794,15.15z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x89e370a9feed4413:0x7cc432d79529eff8!8m2!3d42.3597656!4d-71.092067?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/place/Great+Dome/@42.3615,-71.10...
- kelnos 7y ago
  There are certainly restaurants nearby, but not sure I'd call them cheap. I imagine a lot of MIT students don't have the money to eat out every day. And since most dorms don't have any kind of kitchens or cooking implements, buying food from the grocery and cooking isn't really an option. Pre-made meals or other things from grocery stores that don't require cooking could work, but, again, I'd expect some/many students rely on their university meal plan for their food, and don't have much spare money to buy their own.
  - voidlogic 7y ago
    At my college all the dorms had a kitchen for residents to use in the basement... is this not normal?
    - thaumasiotes 7y ago
      It's not uncommon, but it's also calibrated to the negligible number of residents who want to use the kitchen. If everyone in the dorms suddenly had to eat out of that kitchen, there'd be a several-day waiting list to use it. Which means it's not a viable fallback.
    - protomyth 7y ago
      US colleges earn money off the meal plan and tend to be liability shy so having a full kitchen is a non-starter. Heck, it was against the rules to have a microwave in dorms (even room not in actual dorms) where I went to college. It was a pain in the butt.
      - secstate 7y ago
        Pretty sure the ban on microwaves was an electrical fire risk, not them being predatory about students eating at the dining hall. Can you imagine if even every other room had an appliance pulling 1000W whenever the hell a student felt like warming up some soup?
        zajd 7y ago
- harikb 7y ago
  How could the students or the university trust restaurants stay open? They can't just let the students fight for themselves. I am sure this is the 'least bad option' out of many.
  - alasdair_ 7y ago
    I’m confused. Are the students not mostly adults? Why can’t they be trusted to find their own food in a large city, like any other adult would have to?
    - tonyarkles 7y ago
      Generally when you’re moving to a new city as a non-student, you’re expecting to have to figure all of that out, plus the apartment you’re moving into will generally have a fridge and stove at a minimum. I don’t know how many students we’re talking about here, but at my university there was a small public-use kitchen in each dorm, but it would be madness to try to feed the whole dorm out of it. It was handy for making late night macaroni after coming home from the bar, but... not so much for everyone eating 3 meals a day.
- chmod775 7y ago
  > That sounds crazy to me, in Poland there's a multitude of cheap restaurants full of students close to every university campus. As a rule (non fast-food) restaurants are very expensive in the US compared to most places in Europe. Poland is on the extreme end when it comes to high quality food being extremely cheap. In Berlin it isn't terribly hard to get a healthy and large meal for 4-8 euros at a restaurant for me, but even I was surprised visiting Poland when pretty much every restaurant outdid and undercut that.
  - unishark 7y ago
    > As a rule (non fast-food) restaurants are very expensive in the US compared to most places in Europe. This depends how you define fast food. Which by the way is already a massive segment in the US versus other places. There's a whole range of restaurants in the middle that serve cheap food that you stand in line to order, often serving working-class people, but aren't technically fast food. Maybe not so many in the expensive gentrified area adjacent to a big university of course.
    - rndgermandude 7y ago
      Speaking as another German, fast food is used synonymously with "junk food" here, referring to either fast and unhealthy food (burgers, fries, "fish and ships" in the UK, Currywurst, everything greasy/fatty, etc), or food with large amounts of problematic additives, or fast and low quality stuff. E.g. there is a tiny Vietnamese place around here that's very fast, but also very tasty, very fresh and reasonably priced (6-10 EUR). They are fast as "fast food", but lack the other "qualities" of junk food, so nobody around here would refer to them as fast food. Döner (kebab) shops are somewhere in the middle. They offer unhealthy stuff (tons of - depending on the shop, low grade - kebab meat on a Döner for example) as well as a range of veggies and less greasy meals.
  - pyuser583 7y ago
    Really!? Not my experience - was last in Europe 10 years ago - VAT tax made eating out more expensive. I thought it was VAT tax. Everyone said it was VAT tax.
- onion2k 7y ago
  What would happen if students stayed and then got ill? Are you suggesting that they carry on going to restaurants? How would they eat if they couldn't? You're only considering the best case scenario of people not getting ill. That's not good enough. Sending people home is as much about planning for the future issues as it is about dealing with the current issues.
- laputan_machine 7y ago
  In the UK at least, most students live in shared-housing and cook for themselves from supermarket food, the 'dorm' model is usually used for the first year (~10 people sharing a bathroom and kitchen, although some new builds now have ensuite bathrooms), but never a shared room. Usually no cafeteria either (although some do). I can't believe some people are paying tens of thousands of dollars per semester to share a room!
  - heavenlyblue 7y ago
    Well - you are lying since none of the university accommodation in the UK is covered by tuition fees and it’s costs are sufficiently higher than what you would pay if you didn’t live in dorms. Also I had a friend who lived in a shared bunk room in the UK.
    - Calloutman 7y ago
      I'm not sure if he's edited his post, but it is extremely rare for students to share rooms at any point of their university life. The closest thing we have is a shared study where two people have their own small sleeping room, but share a space with two desks/chairs. And even that is very uncommon.
    - nicoburns 7y ago
      > It’s costs are sufficiently higher than what you would pay if you didn’t live in dorms. This actually varies significantly by university. Prices for accommodation have been going up since the recent government funding cuts (that accompanies the fee increase to £9k), but were traditionally subsidized by the universities such that they were cheaper than market rents.
    - laputan_machine 7y ago
      I am not lying, but you can choose not to believe me if you want. I used to work for MMU, one of my duties was to inspect the first-year halls of residence. It felt strange, as I was younger than them at the time! UK tuition fees are increasing, agreed, but that is a separate argument. Not making an argument against better tuition either, MIT is obviously a leader in some areas. Please assume my intention is positive. I am not willfully spreading misinformation, if I'm wrong, point me to the facts. Cost https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-attendance/annual-student-budget/ https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten... here says $10k/yr for housing, my mortgage isn't even that high. As a comparison: https://www.manchester.ac.uk/study/experience/student-life/living-costs/ https://www.manchester.ac.uk/study/experience/student-life/l... (which I think is still quite high)
generationP 7y ago
Oh, I forgot their undergrad dorms are a lot more youth-hostelly than the grad ones I remember.
komali2 7y ago
Ok, so a population that is majority not at-risk and extraordinarily self-contained is going to be instead distributed into the wider population en masse? Seems insane.
- chris11 7y ago
  I think most students would be more self-contained off-campus. Going entirely online helps, but I wouldn't call college downs clean. Clearing them out is a good idea.
- akiselev 7y ago
  MIT is not "self contained," it's in the middle of the Boston metro less than a few miles away from dozens of other schools including large universities like BU and Harvard. The university can send most of its students home. It can't stop the rest of the world from interacting with them in the middle of a regional hub.
- dnhz 7y ago
  What would instead happen is that students would go on spring break, quite a number of them traveling of town. Some of them would pick up the virus and then it would spread among the student body over the remainder of the semester. That's a plausible scenario that no university would want. Better to have them go home and stay there.
eternalban 7y ago
> Nobody on campus has tested positive yet (as far as we know) Have any been tested? How many have been tested? I am not sure how one determines "risk" (?) with this asymptomatically contagious disease that lingers on surfaces and can travel in aerosal form a few meters. The people at "risk" are the older generation [the parents ..], and movement of people contributes to spreading of the disease. I think MIT is just off loading hot potatoes here.
souprock 7y ago
Many decades ago, the health department should have shut down the shared bathrooms and shared bedrooms. We knew it wasn't OK as soon as we agreed upon the germ theory of disease. It would be great if this disease would finally put a stop to the madness of typical dorm living conditions. An extra benefit would be a huge reduction in conflict. Roommate conflict is stressful and often leads to violence.
- nradov 7y ago
  Seriously? What kind of school did you attend where violence between roommates was common?
vonseel 7y ago
I kind of wish we had dorms for college graduates thinking about a 500 person dining hall, but I doubt that would be good for the COVID situation.
dheera 7y ago
As a fellow MIT alum I still feel that this was a wrong move. Online classes -- GREAT Cancel social events -- GREAT Encouraging students to go home -- GREAT Requiring 4000 students to pack up in a span of a week, getting help from other students to dismantle lofts and home-built furniture and moving heavy boxes, sharing push-carts, sharing vehicles, renting vehicles used by god knows how many strangers, scouting nearby supermarket parking lots for grocery carts because all the dorm push-carts are gone, pushing carts full of boxes around town to storage facilities, cramming hotel rooms, travelling via flights -- BAD I think Stanford's approach is much more reasonable -- they are letting students stay if they wish but are encouraging students to go home.
phyzome 7y ago
Low risk? The Kendall Square area of Cambridge is the very center of the outbreak in the Boston area. That's where MIT is, and where the Biogen headquarters are. Many MIT students will later be discovered to have been exposed, and then exported the disease to places around the US and around the world.

by kyeb 7y ago

iokanuon 7y ago

>Moreover, in our dorms, we have effectively no way to eat if the dining halls close down. That sounds crazy to me, in Poland there's a multitude of cheap restaurants full of students close to every university campus. There's a big demand because universities are packed with students that don't cook for themselves. Why hasn't the same happened to the US then?

CydeWeys 7y ago
There are plenty of fast food places/corner stores/restaurants/groceries in Cambridge within walking distance of MIT dorms. So the "no way to eat" part is a bit dramatic.
- kyeb 7y ago
  The closest grocery is Target in Central square, which is extremely limited or maybe Trader Joe's, which also isn't the same. The Star Market that was right behind campus closed a couple years ago. It's not so easy, in my opinion.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    That Target is less than a mile from all of campus, and a quarter mile from the closest dorms. That's easy walking distance. What am I missing?
    - porknubbins 7y ago
      I’ve seen like most of Boston on a bike share under an hour. There is zero reason students in a dense major city couldn’t buy groceries.
    - perennate 7y ago
      That Target barely has any groceries, it's a small general department store. But yeah there is Trader Joe's, H-Mart, and Whole Foods. Market Basket is a bit further but more like a real grocery.
      - CydeWeys 7y ago
        Yeah, the point is there's a wealth of options for food within a an easy hour round trip of walking (not just specifically the one Target). And a lot more if you have access to a bike. People are not going to starve to death when the alternative is walking 15 minutes to a grocery store. Let's be real. Downtown Cambridge is NOT some food desert like what exists in other parts of the US, where you could walk for hours and not reach the nearest grocery store (this is particularly prevalent in rural areas).
        swader999 7y ago
        This is the point though, if things deteriorate none of these options will be viable.
        CydeWeys 7y ago
        They can't shut down the grocery stores for long periods of time for the simple fact that people will start starving to death, which has a mortality rate strictly worse than any pandemic disease. The only retail businesses still open in the worst-struck parts of China and Italy are the grocery stores and pharmacies, because they have to be open. They are essential. Some of my relatives are Italian and they have to book a specific time slot to go to the grocery store, and that and the pharmacy/doctor/hospital are the only things they can be on the roads to do. These options will continue to be viable unless society completely collapses, which doesn't seem in the cards here.
- nemothekid 7y ago
  I don’t know how much dining hall food costs or if it’s prepaid but you are talking about eating out for every meal on a students budget. The point about bringing up the dining hall is they can’t go to the grocery store because they have no way to cook (and maybe even store) the food they bought.
  - perennate 7y ago
    Ha, the prices are at [1], the cheapest is around $13 per meal. Eating out can be much cheaper, and there are healthy options. [1] https://studentlife.mit.edu/dining/residential-dining/meal-plans https://studentlife.mit.edu/dining/residential-dining/meal-p...
    - kelnos 7y ago
      Meal plans are typically pre-paid at the beginning of the semester. So that money is already gone, and I would expect that eating out for every meal -- even at below $13/meal -- would be out of reach for a lot of students.
      - CydeWeys 7y ago
        I'm expecting to see MIT refund some portion of the semester's food cost now that the dining halls will be shut down.
- slg 7y ago
  There is "no way to eat [while remaining quarantined]". Dorms do not have private kitchens. They don't even have private sinks. I'm not familiar with MIT specifically, but the most you can usually hope for in the average American dorm room is a mini-fridge and a microwave. It would be incredibly difficult to expect a large number of people to live in those conditions for multiple weeks if quarantined.
  - CydeWeys 7y ago
    You're still allowed to go to the grocery store in China. It's one of the very few places you can still go. Same in Italy. Obviously starvation is a much surer death than coronavirus, hence governments are not literally starving people to death by disallowing them from even obtaining food.
    - slg 7y ago
      I was more focusing on the lack of facilities to prepare food. That limits what is available to students from the local grocery stores. Are we going to force these kids to basically eat cereal for every meal for a couple weeks? Do the local grocery stores have the stock of non-perishable and ready to eat foods to meet the needs of these students? Does every student have the funds to purchase this food out of pocket and outside of their meal plan? There are a lot of questions that aren't answered by just pointing to the local grocery store if the dining halls and local restaurants are no longer an option.
      - CydeWeys 7y ago
        Sure, but the dining halls are being closed for the same reason as the dorms. If not for the coronavirus then neither closure would be happening. In other words, it's not like the dining halls are being closed and then as a consequence the dorms are being closed for lack of food options.
        slg 7y ago
        This whole chain of comments started out with the following prompt: >In what way are dorms worse than personal homes for diseases anyway? Are they not trusting their students to prepare their own food? Why don't they just close the dining halls instead? Dining halls are inherently a highly trafficked gathering of a large group of people. That is exactly the type of things people are being instructed to avoid. It is likely a losing effort to try to prevent the spread of the disease through a college campus while still running dining halls at normal service levels. And once the decision is made to close the dining halls, you have to look at other options to feed the students. There is no clear answer to that question due to the reasons outline in previous posts so the ultimate response is to just send people home.
sincerely 7y ago
A lot of american schools have mandatory meal plans for people who live in the school-run dorms (or at least for first-year students in dorms, which is most of the people in dorms)
kortilla 7y ago
A restaurant isn’t an improvement over a dining hall when it comes to exposure to crowds.
otachack 7y ago
Some college towns have cheap restaurants, not all of them do, though.
kyeb 7y ago
MIT is kind of a weird location. Cambridge and Boston are _very_ high cost of living. Plus, every dorm either has kitchens or a dining hall, so the food needs aren't super high typically.
mackey 7y ago
The US is a big place. Those exist in the US too, but MIT is in an area surrounded my software companies and pharmaceuticals. Not a lot of cheap options.
- DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
  I used to work near MIT. At least several years ago, there were surprisingly few places to buy a decent meal near campus. (By surprising, I mean because there were also numerous businesses in that neighborhood with lots of well-paid employees.) The area also has/had a small number of food trucks at lunchtime (only) IIRC.
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    If only we had a taco truck on every street corner.
  - htrp 7y ago
    Kendall has gotten super expensive .... the food trucks are also pretty much the same price as the restaurants for a meal
  - mackey 7y ago
    Yeah, I worked near MIT from 2008 to 2012. It's almost a completely different place now. There weren't a ton of options back then, you had the MIT foodcourt, Rebecca's cafe, a sandwich place that was also a convenient store above a dry cleaner, and maybe Sebastians, but at least they weren't super expensive. It doesn't even seem like the lunch options are better today, just more expensive. And dinner options, forget about it, way too expensive. We used to go to Tommy Doyles after playing corporate softball, and at least you could get a cheap burger.
    - DoofusOfDeath 7y ago
      Yeah, I've been to many of those places, also Chipotle quite a bit. One thing I disliked about grabbing lunch in the area was that it mostly seemed really expensive or unhealthful. I'm about average (I think) in terms of how healthful of a diet I try to have. But around Kendal Square it was hard to avoid crazy amounts of grease and salt in most of the meals. Okay for once in a while, but not every day.
rsynnott 7y ago
American universities are often basically in the middle of nowhere.
- mauvehaus 7y ago
  MIT is most assuredly not: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Great+Dome/@42.3615,-71.1050794,15.15z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x89e370a9feed4413:0x7cc432d79529eff8!8m2!3d42.3597656!4d-71.092067?hl=en https://www.google.com/maps/place/Great+Dome/@42.3615,-71.10...
kelnos 7y ago
There are certainly restaurants nearby, but not sure I'd call them cheap. I imagine a lot of MIT students don't have the money to eat out every day. And since most dorms don't have any kind of kitchens or cooking implements, buying food from the grocery and cooking isn't really an option. Pre-made meals or other things from grocery stores that don't require cooking could work, but, again, I'd expect some/many students rely on their university meal plan for their food, and don't have much spare money to buy their own.
- voidlogic 7y ago
  At my college all the dorms had a kitchen for residents to use in the basement... is this not normal?
  - thaumasiotes 7y ago
    It's not uncommon, but it's also calibrated to the negligible number of residents who want to use the kitchen. If everyone in the dorms suddenly had to eat out of that kitchen, there'd be a several-day waiting list to use it. Which means it's not a viable fallback.
  - protomyth 7y ago
    US colleges earn money off the meal plan and tend to be liability shy so having a full kitchen is a non-starter. Heck, it was against the rules to have a microwave in dorms (even room not in actual dorms) where I went to college. It was a pain in the butt.
    - secstate 7y ago
      Pretty sure the ban on microwaves was an electrical fire risk, not them being predatory about students eating at the dining hall. Can you imagine if even every other room had an appliance pulling 1000W whenever the hell a student felt like warming up some soup?
      - zajd 7y ago
harikb 7y ago
How could the students or the university trust restaurants stay open? They can't just let the students fight for themselves. I am sure this is the 'least bad option' out of many.
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  I’m confused. Are the students not mostly adults? Why can’t they be trusted to find their own food in a large city, like any other adult would have to?
  - tonyarkles 7y ago
    Generally when you’re moving to a new city as a non-student, you’re expecting to have to figure all of that out, plus the apartment you’re moving into will generally have a fridge and stove at a minimum. I don’t know how many students we’re talking about here, but at my university there was a small public-use kitchen in each dorm, but it would be madness to try to feed the whole dorm out of it. It was handy for making late night macaroni after coming home from the bar, but... not so much for everyone eating 3 meals a day.
chmod775 7y ago
> That sounds crazy to me, in Poland there's a multitude of cheap restaurants full of students close to every university campus. As a rule (non fast-food) restaurants are very expensive in the US compared to most places in Europe. Poland is on the extreme end when it comes to high quality food being extremely cheap. In Berlin it isn't terribly hard to get a healthy and large meal for 4-8 euros at a restaurant for me, but even I was surprised visiting Poland when pretty much every restaurant outdid and undercut that.
- unishark 7y ago
  > As a rule (non fast-food) restaurants are very expensive in the US compared to most places in Europe. This depends how you define fast food. Which by the way is already a massive segment in the US versus other places. There's a whole range of restaurants in the middle that serve cheap food that you stand in line to order, often serving working-class people, but aren't technically fast food. Maybe not so many in the expensive gentrified area adjacent to a big university of course.
  - rndgermandude 7y ago
    Speaking as another German, fast food is used synonymously with "junk food" here, referring to either fast and unhealthy food (burgers, fries, "fish and ships" in the UK, Currywurst, everything greasy/fatty, etc), or food with large amounts of problematic additives, or fast and low quality stuff. E.g. there is a tiny Vietnamese place around here that's very fast, but also very tasty, very fresh and reasonably priced (6-10 EUR). They are fast as "fast food", but lack the other "qualities" of junk food, so nobody around here would refer to them as fast food. Döner (kebab) shops are somewhere in the middle. They offer unhealthy stuff (tons of - depending on the shop, low grade - kebab meat on a Döner for example) as well as a range of veggies and less greasy meals.
- pyuser583 7y ago
  Really!? Not my experience - was last in Europe 10 years ago - VAT tax made eating out more expensive. I thought it was VAT tax. Everyone said it was VAT tax.
onion2k 7y ago
What would happen if students stayed and then got ill? Are you suggesting that they carry on going to restaurants? How would they eat if they couldn't? You're only considering the best case scenario of people not getting ill. That's not good enough. Sending people home is as much about planning for the future issues as it is about dealing with the current issues.
laputan_machine 7y ago
In the UK at least, most students live in shared-housing and cook for themselves from supermarket food, the 'dorm' model is usually used for the first year (~10 people sharing a bathroom and kitchen, although some new builds now have ensuite bathrooms), but never a shared room. Usually no cafeteria either (although some do). I can't believe some people are paying tens of thousands of dollars per semester to share a room!
- heavenlyblue 7y ago
  Well - you are lying since none of the university accommodation in the UK is covered by tuition fees and it’s costs are sufficiently higher than what you would pay if you didn’t live in dorms. Also I had a friend who lived in a shared bunk room in the UK.
  - Calloutman 7y ago
    I'm not sure if he's edited his post, but it is extremely rare for students to share rooms at any point of their university life. The closest thing we have is a shared study where two people have their own small sleeping room, but share a space with two desks/chairs. And even that is very uncommon.
  - nicoburns 7y ago
    > It’s costs are sufficiently higher than what you would pay if you didn’t live in dorms. This actually varies significantly by university. Prices for accommodation have been going up since the recent government funding cuts (that accompanies the fee increase to £9k), but were traditionally subsidized by the universities such that they were cheaper than market rents.
  - laputan_machine 7y ago
    I am not lying, but you can choose not to believe me if you want. I used to work for MMU, one of my duties was to inspect the first-year halls of residence. It felt strange, as I was younger than them at the time! UK tuition fees are increasing, agreed, but that is a separate argument. Not making an argument against better tuition either, MIT is obviously a leader in some areas. Please assume my intention is positive. I am not willfully spreading misinformation, if I'm wrong, point me to the facts. Cost https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-attendance/annual-student-budget/ https://sfs.mit.edu/undergraduate-students/the-cost-of-atten... here says $10k/yr for housing, my mortgage isn't even that high. As a comparison: https://www.manchester.ac.uk/study/experience/student-life/living-costs/ https://www.manchester.ac.uk/study/experience/student-life/l... (which I think is still quite high)

generationP 7y ago

Oh, I forgot their undergrad dorms are a lot more youth-hostelly than the grad ones I remember.

komali2 7y ago

Ok, so a population that is majority not at-risk and extraordinarily self-contained is going to be instead distributed into the wider population en masse? Seems insane.

chris11 7y ago
I think most students would be more self-contained off-campus. Going entirely online helps, but I wouldn't call college downs clean. Clearing them out is a good idea.
akiselev 7y ago
MIT is not "self contained," it's in the middle of the Boston metro less than a few miles away from dozens of other schools including large universities like BU and Harvard. The university can send most of its students home. It can't stop the rest of the world from interacting with them in the middle of a regional hub.
dnhz 7y ago
What would instead happen is that students would go on spring break, quite a number of them traveling of town. Some of them would pick up the virus and then it would spread among the student body over the remainder of the semester. That's a plausible scenario that no university would want. Better to have them go home and stay there.

eternalban 7y ago

> Nobody on campus has tested positive yet (as far as we know) Have any been tested? How many have been tested? I am not sure how one determines "risk" (?) with this asymptomatically contagious disease that lingers on surfaces and can travel in aerosal form a few meters. The people at "risk" are the older generation [the parents ..], and movement of people contributes to spreading of the disease. I think MIT is just off loading hot potatoes here.

souprock 7y ago

Many decades ago, the health department should have shut down the shared bathrooms and shared bedrooms. We knew it wasn't OK as soon as we agreed upon the germ theory of disease. It would be great if this disease would finally put a stop to the madness of typical dorm living conditions. An extra benefit would be a huge reduction in conflict. Roommate conflict is stressful and often leads to violence.

nradov 7y ago
Seriously? What kind of school did you attend where violence between roommates was common?

vonseel 7y ago

I kind of wish we had dorms for college graduates thinking about a 500 person dining hall, but I doubt that would be good for the COVID situation.

dheera 7y ago

As a fellow MIT alum I still feel that this was a wrong move. Online classes -- GREAT Cancel social events -- GREAT Encouraging students to go home -- GREAT Requiring 4000 students to pack up in a span of a week, getting help from other students to dismantle lofts and home-built furniture and moving heavy boxes, sharing push-carts, sharing vehicles, renting vehicles used by god knows how many strangers, scouting nearby supermarket parking lots for grocery carts because all the dorm push-carts are gone, pushing carts full of boxes around town to storage facilities, cramming hotel rooms, travelling via flights -- BAD I think Stanford's approach is much more reasonable -- they are letting students stay if they wish but are encouraging students to go home.

phyzome 7y ago

Low risk? The Kendall Square area of Cambridge is the very center of the outbreak in the Boston area. That's where MIT is, and where the Biogen headquarters are. Many MIT students will later be discovered to have been exposed, and then exported the disease to places around the US and around the world.