Graduate students looking for housing in the Hanover area are faced with a limited set of options, according to Graduate Student Council President Tina Chang GR '10. Affordable off-campus housing is in short supply, while on-campus housing provided by the College tends to be more expensive than housing offered by peer institutions, Chang said.
In a survey last year, graduate students identified accessible, affordable housing as one of the top three issues facing Dartmouth graduate students, Brian Pogue, dean of graduate studies, said in an interview with The Dartmouth. Graduate students at Dartmouth typically spend about 50 percent of their student stipends on housing, Pogue said. Housing for graduate students is normally considered affordable if it costs about a third of such a stipend, he said.
In 2008, Dartmouth graduate students paid between $70 and $250 more in rent per month than did students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the other Ivy League schools, according to unpublished data compiled by former engineering Ph.D student David Lukofsky Th '09, who served as the Graduate Student Council North Park Activities Coordinator from 2008 to 2009.
On-campus housing is available for roughly 10 percent of the 1,375 enrolled graduate students, the Council on Graduate Studies found in a report discussed last week at a meeting of the Steering Committee of the General Faculty.
The College has 111 beds available to Dartmouth graduate students at the North Park housing complex and 255 apartments at Sachem Village, according to Jennifer Jones, assistant property manager at the Dartmouth Real Estate Office. There are also 17 College-owned apartments available on Lebanon St,, Sanborn Rd., and West Wheelock St., in addition to 12 units currently at the South Street complex, Jones said.
The rent for a single-room College-owned apartment has increased from $550 to $816 in a little under four years, Jones and Chang said.
"[Graduate students] only get stipends of about $1,800 a month, and we're not allowed to work either that's in your contract for the stipend," Chang said. "Both in terms of limited space available and also the cost of rent, [Dartmouth housing is] just not affordable for students."
Despite concerns about affordability, the least expensive housing offered by Dartmouth is often the last to be filled, according to Kim Chewning, real estate manager at the Dartmouth Real Estate Office.
Chewning also noted that, due to the recent economic crisis, Dartmouth's Real Estate Office decided not to increase rent for students who renewed a previous lease last year. Housing officials have not yet determined whether they will hold off on price increases for next year, she said.
While demand for housing in North Park has previously been high enough to require waiting lists, this year one unit remained unfilled, Chewning said.
Chang attributed the decline in interest to students' belief that units at North Park are overpriced, noting that students could find comparably priced housing elsewhere that better meets their needs.
MIT provides less expensive dormitory housing for graduate students, as opposed to apartments, Chang said. Such a system is "unrealistic" at Dartmouth given the small number of graduate students, Chang said, though she noted that students at the Tuck School of Business do currently have access to dormitory housing.
"We don't know how other institutions are driving down the costs," Chang said, arguing that the College should work to create housing options that are more affordable than current off-campus housing.
Building more affordable housing, similar to North Park, could help alleviate students' housing difficulties, Pogue said. The recent economic crisis, however, makes new construction unlikely in the near future, he said.
Several graduate students also pointed to the high cost of off-campus housing in and around Hanover.
"I wasn't expecting housing to be this expensive in such a rural area," Ivy Ran GR '15 said.
Renting a room in an off-campus apartment shared with others starts at $550 per person for housing five miles from campus, $650 for housing within one mile, and $750 to $800 for housing on campus, local realtor Jolin Salazar-Kish said in an interview with The Dartmouth.
Only a small number of graduate students rent units from Salazar-Kish that fall in the $800 range, instead most often choosing units in the $650 range, she said.
"Our rents include everything except heat and electricity, and we subsidize heat," she said.
Graduate students often do not select the most affordable housing, instead taking into account other factors that are also important to them, Ran said. She noted that she sought a location with covered parking that was close to her work at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center.
"I don't get more value for money [living off campus], but I have a very particular need that I wanted to be fulfilled," she said.
