Extreme Makeover: Dorm Edition

In a surge of creativity, colleges are enticing students by bedding them. Full beds have been added to the list of dorm amenities by schools across the U.S. Students at the University of North Carolina, Case Western Reserve University, the University of Massachusetts and American University will now have full instead of twin beds.\nShould President Michael McRobbie follow the trend and add wider beds to his IU development plan? \nCollege is a place where the coddled daddy’s girl and mama’s boy become adults through rough Spartan discipline. Stark dorms with sagging mattresses have been able to provide privileged offspring with invaluable tenement housing experience. The twin bed has long been a dorm staple. Some of us seem to remember bedding down on piles of hay. Take them away and colleges will begin to graduate spoiled Paris Hilton clones. Prior generations of students have been able to weather the rite of passage that is the twin bed. Today’s whiny brats are not that special to merit four-star treatment.\nAdding full beds will definitely not come cheap. In wake of rising room and board rates, the University should be looking at ways to cut costs, not increase them. This whole full-bed business is starting to look like a suspect gimmick to lure in students and boost prices, like “free” iPods or laptops.\nIn fact, the whole thing is just impractical. Dorm rooms are notoriously tiny spaces. Adding a full bed in such a cramped space will leave little room for students to dance naked or fit a beer pong table, and it will decrease the number of people that can be squeezed into the room. Avoiding your roommate will be less feasible and less floor area will be available for coverage by clothes and books.\nWith such comfy beds, how will the students ever go to class? The uncomfortable and saggy beds give students incentive to wake up and actually go to their morning classes. Cozy beds will doom class attendance since we’ll be rolling around in bed instead of plodding to Ballantine. We need beds of concrete and steel to motivate us.\nOn the other hand, there are definite benefits to wider beds. Students would be less likely to fall off their beds; it’s notoriously difficult to stay put on the top bunk when in an altered state of consciousness. Wider beds would also be able to accommodate the freshman 15 better since wider beds fit wider students.\nAlso, what better way to support free love than bigger beds? With the advent of full beds, music practice rooms can return to their intended purpose, as students return to their own beds for rocking the kasbah. Full beds will definitely allow IU to live up to its party school reputation. Instead of studious dorks, many more ordinary students might take advantage of the single rooms. Again, though, all that time in bed means less time in class.\nStill, considering all the facts at hand, we say keep the shabby twin beds. Dorms aren’t hotels, and soft beds beget soft students.