As students across campus prepare to move out of the room they have been living in for the last nine months, many might wonder what determines the rates they pay, and whether it is worth it.

There are three relevant factors in answering that question, according to Student Housing administrators. How does on-campus housing compare in cost and service to off-campus housing? How does it compare to peer institutions like Harvard or Yale? And how happy are students?

While Housing administrators cite favorable studies in response to the last two questions, their claims to be a superior alternative to off-campus options are disputed, perhaps unsurprisingly, by off-campus residents.

Undergraduates across campus live in a variety of rooms, with space per person varying according to the location and the date of construction. Some freshmen live in Lagunita’s so-called “mini-doubles,” which gets them 160 square feet of shared living space. Other students enjoy Bob and Jerry’s 260-square-foot doubles and Governor’s Corner’s 140-square-foot singles.

For this space, undergraduates pay a standard annual dormitory rate of $5,572, a number comparable to the Ivies [see sidebar]. Some off-campus residents say their current living arrangements give them more space for the same amount of money. What, then, is the reason behind current rates?

Executive Director of Student Housing Rodger Whitney cites the services provided by on-campus residence.

“We’re generally 20 percent below the market rate [off-campus],” Whitney said. “But off-campus, you don’t have resident fellows and resident assistants, and you don’t have wireless Internet access, and you don’t have computer clusters, and you don’t have lounges, and usually you pay for your utilities separately. Those are intangibles. You can look at the dollar-to-dollar, but when you add in the the things we have that they don’t have, it’s even better. “

For example, according to Residential and Dining Enterprises (R&DE) Marketing Director Jamie Williams ‘97, there is one custodian for every 90 residents.

Comparison to local housing

alternatives

Some off-campus dwellers, like Ricardo Gilb ‘07, say they get a much better deal than what Housing has to offer.

“It’s one of the persistent myths that it costs more to live off-campus,” Gilb said. “It costs maybe $600 a month for room and $400 for board on-campus. Off-campus, you’ll spend a bit more on rent and a bit less on food.”

Gilb lives in a two-person, 1,000-square-foot unit in Redwood City and says he spends $655 a month for rent and utilities.

Of course, other off-campus options exist that are significantly more expensive than on-campus residences.

Jose Campos ‘08 lived in the Stanford Oak Creek Apartments on Sand Hill Road for one quarter last year. Campos says he paid around $2,000 a month for rent, but pointed out the services provided were atypical.

“Oak Creek has amazing facilities,” he said. “It makes you feel like you’re living in a resort.”

Caring for The Farm

Construction costs are, of course, a significant factor driving rates. On average, Williams said, it costs $130,000 to $150,000 per “bed” — that is, to build accommodations for one person. Though it may, as Williams said, “vary significantly project to project.”

Local architect Grace Hinton, who has worked on several University projects in the past, said that quality of work and the use of unionized labor push the figure that high.

“Quality is significantly [higher] at Stanford than at local municipalities,” Hinton said. “If you drive around Palo Alto and look at the infrastructure versus driving around campus, [Stanford is] really trying to preserve the buildings for the long term.”

The preservation program, called SHARP, costs 11 to 12 million dollars a year, according to Whitney — a bit more than 10 percent of the annual budget.

“We’ve got a whole sophisticated program, where every single very small asset of housing — every roof, every plumbing system, every carpet, every set of lamps is catalogued,” he said. “We know what the life is of each one of these is in all of our 350 buildings, and we can put these on a grid, and see what’s going to drop dead this year. We’ve done that on a 50-year lifecycle.”

Another large expense specific to on-campus living is emergency preparedness. Student Housing is responsible for seismically retrofitting buildings; R&DE is putting plans in place to provide seven days of food and water for 13,000 to 25,000 people in the event of an earthquake, fire, flood or pandemic. While the latter plan is still being finalized, Williams says the one-time cost will run into the millions of dollars.

“You imagine the supplies we have to keep, to have on hand,” Whitney said, “because you can’t order them the day the earthquake hits.”

Local government is also a factor increasing costs. Under Santa Clara County’s General Use Permit, Stanford is only allowed to build 2,035,000 square feet of buildings for any purpose on its land until 2011.

“Planning building will take twice [as] long to get through as a normal business-type building that’s not part of Stanford’s land,” Hinton said, “because Stanford gets special scrutiny from the county.”

Other factors act to push down costs down for dorm residents, such as more centralized bathroom and kitchen facilities relative to apartments.

“Three bathrooms with one stall cost more than one bathroom with three stalls,” Hinton said, citing space considerations as well as building codes like that imposed by the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Building individual as opposed to communal bathrooms, she added, “is probably doubling or tripling the costs.”

Comparison to peer institutions

Whitney and Williams said that Stanford compares well with peer institutions, citing student surveys and a proprietary study conducted by an outside consultant comparing Stanford’s services to Ivy League universities.

Williams said the only areas where the University lags are trash collection and utilities. At Columbia University in New York, high-rise dorms make it easier to pick up trash. At Stanford’s sprawling campus, it costs more to send drivers to more dispersed locations. California is known for its higher-than-average electricity costs.

And higher electricity costs are only part of the equation — costs are generally higher in California.

“[Building] costs in California are double what they are in the rest of the country,” Hinton said. “It’s not only California regulations — there are earthquakes, and there are things that have to be built to earthquake standards. Everything built before 1989 is probably not up to certain standards.”

In the most recent survey of student attitudes on housing, average results in every category from custodial services to repairs were above 4.0 on a 5-point scale. Whitney said that 4.0 is “very good.”

And while they disagree on its merits, residential marketing director Williams and off-campus resident Gilb agree that on-campus housing is central to student life.

“Life at Stanford is really residence-based,” Gilb said. “There’s no getting around that.”