Once you are enrolled in a college and have paid your fees for the term, you are more or less trapped. Aside from transferring or dropping out, you have little freedom to engage with alternatives beyond the college, and your money has no power to incentivize change within the institution. A college acts like a business in how it takes money, then acts as a communist state in how it delivers its services.
In the outside, capitalist world, if Sweetgreen stops making my favorite salad, I can go to Chopt. If Sweetgreen knows they could lose me, they will have an incentive to retain my preferred salad, so long as there is a critical mass of people who would respond in a similar manner to me. But if my college’s dining hall stops serving my favorite salad, I can — and did — complain, but they already have my money. I have no option but to continue using my allocated swipes there despite the decline in quality. The College’s dining services decide what is served and, largely, the students must accept that meal despite dissatisfaction.
Similarly, all freshmen are mandated to live on campus and are randomly assigned housing despite high variance in the quality of the housing. Some housing is mold-infested — which has made multiple students sick. Other housing, like the East Wheelock dorms, is clean and hotel-like. While assigning housing by willingness to pay would create an uncomfortable class divide on college campuses, the mandate for freshman housing on campus, combined with the high variance of housing options, forces students to pay for services they may not receive. Once again, students begrudgingly accept their fates because they have no choice.
Even when a student is off-campus, the college can charge them. If a Dartmouth student wants to do a transfer term at another college through a program that does not go directly through Dartmouth, they must pay $2,200 to Dartmouth — unless it is the fall term, likely because the campus tends to be overcrowded, and the college tries to incentivize students to be off. It is a clear infringement upon a student’s freedom to charge them for a term not spent on campus, but there is no market force stopping the College from doing so.
Even the student employment system is communist in structure. The hourly rates tend to be relatively uniform across student jobs with menial raises for expertise. Less pleasant jobs such as dining pay slightly higher wages after workers negotiated with Dartmouth Dining. It is shocking, however, that library workers, who simply need to sit at the desk and do their homework, are paid similar wages to residential advisors, research assistants and teaching assistants. While students may still seek more demanding jobs to build work experience, from a purely financial perspective, library desk jobs are the best jobs. Much like how taxi drivers in Cuba make more than doctors, the economic incentives for more demanding jobs is skewed by College student employment systems.
The rigidity of the College’s systems and lack of understanding towards the students that they are meant to serve is infuriating and devastating. Student Body President Sabik Jawad wrote a heartbreaking article about how after his father passed away and his family put all their savings into keeping him at Dartmouth, the College took his undergraduate advisor earnings out of his financial aid scholarship.
The Financial Aid Office uses rigid, uncompromising and evadeable criteria to decide which students get financial aid, which students get full-rides and which students have to shell out almost $400,000 to attend the institution. In attempting to be equitable to students, the College creates extreme inequality in how it treats its students. When it fails to accurately distinguish between who should and shouldn’t get financial aid, the College seriously diminishes the purpose of its aid program. Cases of families misrepresenting and sheltering their wealth on financial aid documents means that Dartmouth may offer students with better ability to pay financial aid while putting other students in extreme debt to pay for college.
The College extracts money from families under a capitalist business model, then traps students in a rigid, communist microcosm. The bureaucracy of the College is not motivated to meet its students’ demands because there is no penalty for bad service and no bottom-up incentive structure to change institutional policies in response to student demands.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
