June 2, 2004 Story

Dorm Life Gets Posh Twist in South Loop

At home in Clare, Mich., Patty Dysinger has two bedrooms to herself. When she heads for college in the fall, she figures the closest she'll come to duplicating the comforts of home is an apartment in a new South Loop mega-dorm expressly designed for the space-craving, market-savvy tastes of her generation.

"It's not cramped," the 18-year-old declared after touring a model of a 365-square-foot double room festooned with bright IKEA sheets, campus tchotchkes and memo boards. "I like to entertain," she said. "You don't want your friends tripping over each other getting to the hors d'oeuvres." Dysinger is one of 1,850 students vying for 1,680 coveted spots at University Center of Chicago, a lavish work-in-progress at State Street and Congress Parkway that is scheduled to open in August. Owned by Columbia College, DePaul University and Roosevelt University, the 18-story project is the largest in the country that is trying to blend students from three institutions into an urban "vertical campus."

It also reflects a generation of savvy consumers accustomed to privacy, service and choice--the first wave of collegiate Gen-Yers, who are willing to pay more for college housing--in this case, up to $5,000 a year more--if it means getting what they want.

Willing, too, are their parents, otherwise known as the "Bank of Mom and Dad" to David Morrison, president of the Philadelphia-based research firm TWENTYSOMETHING Inc. Many of these parents would happily finance good college memories to make up for subjecting their kids to a childhood divorce or a latchkey youth, he said.

SEEKING THE 'GOOD LIFE'

Still, the real spenders are students, as noted by retailers such as J.C. Penney, with its Campus Shop, and Linens 'n Things' Destination Dorm gift registry.

"Today's 15.6 million college students are not rollerblading, beer-worshipping slackers," Morrison writes in his book "Marketing to the Campus Crowd: Everything You Need to Know to Capture the $200 Billion College Market," to be released this month. "They are avid consumers with a taste for the good life and the ability to afford it."

Often an only child or one of two children, Baby Boomers' kids "come to us with a whole different experience at home," said John Collins, president of the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. In many cases, they have grown up with a bedroom and shower to themselves, he said. "It's reasonable to think they'd have that expectation when they come to university or college." In planning new dormitories, gone are the days when female freshmen trooped down the hallway to the community shower with a plastic bucket of toiletries. Gone, too, are the "barracks"-type dorm rooms where Mark Kelly, vice president of student affairs at Columbia College, spent his undergraduate years. "We didn't think of it as barracks," said Kelly, 53. "It was fine. But cinder-block rooms, basic meat-and-potatoes food, common bathrooms. ... When I was in college, what was there was what you got."

Today, students and their parents can shop for colleges and take virtual housing tours online. They sink tens of thousands of dollars into the college experience.

A DIFFERENT MINDSET

When students take a campus tour, "they're asking, `Where am I going to eat? Where am I going to work out? Where am I going to park my car?... They're not complaining about the cost. They're asking about what they're getting for the cost." Or, as in Dysinger's case, they're willing to swallow the cost. "I'll be paying my student loans till I'm 50," she said.

At University Center, DePaul students will pay $220 more for a double room with a shared bathroom than at the somewhat comparable 4-year-old Belden Racine Hall on the school's Lincoln Park campus. A private University Center studio apartment, at $10,526 for the academic year, costs more than twice as much as a double in a 30-year-old DePaul dorm with no air conditioning and a bathroom down the hall. The national average cost for a room at a private four-year institution in 2001 was $3,571, plus $3,111 for board, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Tuition and fees added $16,287.

QUARTER-ACRE TERRACE

With rents from $723 to $1,139 a month, excluding meals, University Center will be a world unto itself, with a vibrant street-front lobby leading to a fitness club, art studio, multimedia space and soundproof music practice rooms. The building's social hub is the "great room," which features a floor-to-ceiling stone hearth with fireplace and opens onto a quarter-acre terrace with patio furniture and lush plantings.

"I wouldn't be surprised if some of the students might want to come back here for their weddings," said Edward Bell, senior director of U.S. Equities, which manages the residence hall. To the eyes of someone born during the Reagan years, the dorms built during the last great college-enrollment bubble--the 1950s and '60s--can seem confined, dreary and certainly without enough electrical outlets to support a DVD player, personal computer, cell-phone charger, microwave and blow-dryer.

But amenities aside, the commodity most in demand is privacy, Bell said. No one at University Center has to share a bathroom with more than three people. Students who opt for an apartment with common living room and kitchen will have their own bedrooms. One-person studios, the most expensive lodging at University Center, were snatched up fast. DePaul senior Nick Homyak, a business major, made sure he was first in line in November to reserve his solo apartment. "I'm going to be 23 next year," he said. "I really don't want to deal with 19-year-old people's [issues]." Homyak doesn't care that he might have to take an extra part-time job to pay the rent. University Center "is like a resort," he said.

"It's 21st Century," said Andrew Jones, 20, a junior at Roosevelt who will work as a resident adviser at the center. "We want class."

Abbreviated Version
© 2004 Chicago Tribune