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Some BU students press school for free laundry

The Daily Free Press reports a group of students are demanding Boston University provide free washing machines and dryers across campus. The school offered to look at helping out students with financial need pay for washing their clothes, but the group says that's not good enough - laundry needs to be free for all.


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Comments

how did these poor kids do laundry before all this?

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Smart. You always want to start with an inch.

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oh FFS!
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I'm glad the school is willing to look into it for need-based - I'm sure some of their student body is just about homeless. Couch-crashing, etc....
But - "needs to be free for all"?! Pathetic. AND clueless.
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Tell us, "group of students" - how many of you understand that "free" will just be tacked onto your bill and therefore your enormous GSL debt? ....or do you just figure there will be debt forgiveness?

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piss old people off so bad?

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Coincidental, not causal - I was already grumpy and pissy about stupid people when I was younger.......................................................................................................................

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Of all the apartments I lived in prior to owning my own house, all except one included laundry machines in the basement that tenants could use without additional payment. For the students to ask their landlord, to whom they are paying rent at luxury prices, to start including laundry as an amenity is not exactly raging communism.

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For apartments the cut off seems to be free if the building was 2 or 3 units and pay-per-load if it was a larger complex.

Anyway, the students are focused on the wrong thing. Why not ask the school to cap (e)textbook fees at $50/class/semester?

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The school has no control over textbook prices (or very little control -- it has some influence as a major buyer, but not a whole lot).

The school has 100% control, on the other hand, over whether or not the laundry machines in the dorm basements have coin readers on them.

My last apartments before owning were in a 5 unit building and somewhere around 100 units, both of which had free laundry included.

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The school could mandate faculty not require texts that cost beyond a set dollar amount.

Doing so would greatly help students more than any laundry credits.

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Depending on what limit you choose to set, that could severely limit the options available to teach many courses, which would in turn infringe on academic freedom. Many instructors don't care if you buy a beat up, used, prior edition of the textbook if it is financial advantageous, but they do want to be able to pick what textbook best compliments the way they teach their students.

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A university trying to tell its faculty what books to assign might not provoke the violence of the early 20th century mine workers’ strikes, but it would be such a departure from accepted norms and would lead to one hell of a confrontation, one that I don’t think a university president would likely survive with his or her job intact.

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Renting a room from somebody, or renting an apartment in a two-family - sure! Three-unit - maybe. Anything larger that I ever rented - if there was a laundry room it was coin-op (or card in later years)
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If they're talking about what to build into new dorm units and want to included in-unit laundry that can be factored into the yearly housing price - sure! That didn't seem to be what they were talking about, though.

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I used to live in a two family and the landlord put in machines and charged us an extra fifty dollars a month for the "luxury" of having access to the cheap used machines he bought. I left a few months later before he found more dimes to strangle.

Every other building I have ever lived in had coin laundry.

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Unless you you were able to opt out. Requiring amenity fees is illegal in Massachusetts. I do real estate part time, usually only pertaining to rentals in the building I live in and manage, and list friends' properties or help others find housing. I always inform clients looking for housing to be wary of listings include things like application fees or move-in fees "to be covered by tenant" (a tenant is never liable for a building's application or move in fee. If a building's management requires an application or move in fee, the unit owner must pay that, though a broker can charge an application fee to a client looking for housing, but that's for the service the broker is offering, not for the housing itself) or "pet deposits" (expressly banned if it, taken with the normal security deposit, exceeds one month's rent, though if the security deposit plus the pet deposit together do not exceed one month's rent, that's okay), and have informed listing agents that I've advised my clients that such fees are illegal. I'm pretty certain that most, if not all, agents who mention those fees on listings are not acting in bad faith (A quick Craigslist search found only nine current listings that mention move-in fees) and are innocently ignorant of the statute and case law, as I'm sure they don't want to jeopardize their real estate licenses. There is case law that makes recovery of an illegal fee actionable and subject to treble damages, even if a tenant agrees to it.

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...when was the last time you did laundry at a laundromat?

Do you know what it costs?

Do you know where they're located?

Would you be able to carry your clothes there and back?

If you got there and found all machines out of service (soooo common) or in use or taken over for the laundromat's "wash dry and fold" service, would you have the time available to wait around for an hour or two or three for them to become available?

I may be wrong, but my sense is that people who say doing laundry in a laundromat is no big deal have probably not done it in a while.

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"May be" wrong? Give yourself more credit - you're way closer to wrong than "may be".
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Now, I haven't done laundry regularly in a laundromat in years, so you got that one tiny bit right - built on all your baseless mischaracterizations of what I said, so not worth a pocket full of lint, thanks for playing.
I wasn't talking about laundromats at all, I wasn't dismissing it as no big deal. Believe me, I am quite aware of the benefits of not having to run out every week or two with bags & bags, blow a whole evening on it, making sure there was enough time before closing to do all the wash I had, hoard quarters for the week leading up (back in prehistoric times) in case the change machine at the 'mat wasn't working, walk to & from with all that weight, uphill both ways in the snow, fighting dinosaurs, etc....
I do know where my closest 3 laundromats are (used to be 4 - one closed). I am very grateful that I have the convenience of laundry in my unit that I can use whenever & multitask (or be lazy) - convenience that I paid for.
To expand on what I said in another comment above... It would be one thing if they were talking about changing planning for dorm construction to have laundry facilities more readily accessible to students in their living areas. It would be interesting if they made the case about what it would mean to their time. They'd probably get it - campus life elements are built around focus points & preferences that weren't even pipe dream options a generation or two ago - very flexible meal plans, much greater variety in menus, student center and rec/exercise amenities, etc...
However, they didn't make any of those cases - their focus is "free"

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Which schools pay for the students' laundry?

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Northeastern provides students in on-campus housing with something like 15 loads of laundry worth of credit on their accounts for each semester (so about 1 load per week), then they can purchase additional laundry credits if they run out.

At the end of the day, the students are still paying for it, yes. However, when some level of "free" laundry is built in to the housing fees, that added cost can be paid for by scholarships, financial aid, loans, etc rather than costing the students cash out of their pocket on the spot.

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When I went to Northeastern I didn't live on campus, so I have no idea what they were doing way back then. I did live on the Umass/Amherst campus and we paid for our own laundry then. I suppose I just sorta assumed that paying for laundry or dragging it home to Mom was just part of growing up.

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Which schools pay for their students’ use of elevators? Which schools pay for their students’ drinking water? Which schools pay for their students’ toilet paper, soap, and paper towels in the on campus bathrooms? Which schools pay for their students’ towels in the gym?

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What schools include the meal plan in tuition? What schools have free soda and snack machines?

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And appears to still do so.

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"..He added free laundry could potentially come about as a component of a financial aid package for students."

Spoken like a kid who doesn't understand how the financial aid package for students works. Personal expenses are already calculated into the student budget. https://www.bu.edu/admissions/tuition-aid/tuition/

Those kids who would struggle to pay for their own laundry, their aid package gives them funding for room and board, transportation, books and living expenses. If they're really struggling, they can skip the dryer and hang their clothes on a clothing rack in their room.

This is a stupid and pointless struggle, and makes these kids look foolish. You want to protest some injustice in the system? Protest the cost of books, or that BU doesn't subsidize the cost of the MBTA, or that the Work Study system is quite flawed. Protest how BU invests its massive endowment, or that the military does research on bombs at BU.

Kids took over the admin building in the 70s to protest the draft, and took over the GSU in 2004 to protest the Iraq War, and you kids are upset about laundry.

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It may not be intuitive but cheap accessible clothes washing saves energy and landfill. When I was a student, and renting apartments in boston I often worked 60 to 90 hours a week to afford rent. This is normal but I never had time for laundry. So I acquired about month to 6 weeks worth of clothes to get by. Once I had a washer, I could wash and hang dry clothes while I worked or slept, I found that I wore only 25% of my current favorite things.

If they argue that providing efficient washers throughout student housing will save energy and waste. Also if the machines are in semi private spaces near home, less clothes will be lost through theft.

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Along with directions on how to use those at the river's edge without falling in...

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The WAY things were done (tm) (c)
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which is to say "Make sure you use a smooth rock and light starch on President Silber's shirts!"

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Debating how to allocate costs seems reasonable.

Demanding stuff (or saying it "needs" to be free) just sounds entitled, or otherwise like an inappropriate complaint. (At least, this is how it comes across to me)

Ps- pretty sure I paid a buck or so per load at UMass, both in campus and off. Fwiw.

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