Opinion: Student laundry; practical requirement, or paid premium?
Laundry isn’t something you tend to think of as optional, especially as a student attending a college. Yet students here at Dean College seem to be asking themselves one question day after day, “Why is my laundry so expensive?”
It's a valid question and one that most seem to think will be irrelevant to bring up as it seems too far gone to do anything about. However, some students are finally pushing for change. As a new petition for free laundry has circulated the internet and has students at Dean rallying together to make a difference.
On change.org a petition named “Make Laundry Free at Dean College” was started by Ava Duffy, a student at Dean for three years now. In the description, Ava highlights some of the problems with students having to pay for their own laundry. The Dean Daily spoke with Ava to better understand these problems and even get insight into several other problems revolving around this issue.
One of the glaring issues that stood out was the cost of tuition in comparison to what we as students pay for laundry. Sticker price on tuition for Dean as of right now stands at $48,128, and pairing a cycle in with washing and drying will run you about $3.90 which can go up if you have a larger washer load. This combined with the recommended loads of laundry per week, which is around 1-3 for the average student, adds up to $12 per week.
On its own this is bad, but this doesn’t include that some weeks you have a lot more laundry to do if you are a preforming arts major or athlete, or even if the laundry machine doesn’t break which they do shockingly often. It all adds up very quickly and costs you money out of your pocket that you may not have as a college student.
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So, what’s the solution? Well, Ava has a compromise in mind; “I think the compromise that I would feel is necessary is to just eliminate paying for separate loads of laundry and instead include the cost of laundry into the cost of housing.” While it may seem like you’re just paying for the cost somewhere else, you likely would be saving money.
According to an article by the Diamond Back student newspaper for the University of Maryland (UMD), in 2021 their housing department voted to add a unified laundry fee to the housing cost. The math was done that their students spend about $96 per academic year and at the time, the estimated cost of added tuition would have been $75, something that would have likely been included in a lot of student’s scholarships and loans.
And at Dean, our load of laundry costs only 90¢ more than theirs, so the price variation wouldn’t be very different for us. And students all over the country are raising their voices with concerns and issues over similar topics, with some schools like UMD acknowledging and fixing the issue.
Contrastingly, it could be seen as a too complex arrangement for the college to do. Currently Dean gets its laundry through the third-party contractors Laundry Connect, and they are most likely bound to some sort of contract that would make switching away from their pay per load model to be something that would take more time and effort possible in the time it should require.
It could also be the case that other amenities would have to be cut down or reduced as a result of this change if it were to be implemented. It could very well be one of those circumstances where here at Dean we get certain benefits and perks while sacrificing other aspects like, for example, our unlimited dining plan available to resident students.
Regardless, it’s clear by the voice of not only Ava but also nearly 300 signatures from fellow students that change is wanted and desired. Of course, there are always two sides to everything.
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