With the tuition increases and the massive increase in housing costs, going to a public college in California costs several times what it did a few decades ago. It's a serious problem.
However, students living with professors is a terrible idea. There is already too much sexual misbehavior with weird power dynamics in academia, especially between professors and grad students, and this all happens without them living together. It would only get worse.
The real solution is to build more affordable student housing on or near campus, but that would require funds from the state government, which is unlikely to provide them.
Local residents’ objections to new housing often stymie new development, and Santa Cruz is running into the same problem. The university is years away from building a planned 3,000 campus housing unit, but thousands of local residents have already signed a petition to stop the development, notes Curbed San Francisco.
Not only funds, but it would require a shift in the attitude of the locals towards such buildings.
It's kind of upsetting the first thing you think about is sexual assault. If they can't be trusted to share houses with students to they point that they'd assault them, they probably shouldn't teach them.
Sexual assault is only one of the many kinds of sexual misbehavior that happens at universities. Even consensual relationships between students and professors are problematic. There are a lot of degrees of sexual misconduct between consensual relationships and physical assault to worry about.
Do people who lease out their homes on airbnb regularly assault the tenants? Do they regularly have consensual relationships with them? I'm aware they may be an issue, but it certainly hasn't been as much an issue that it made the headlines, the most common issue I read about is airbnb raising the ire of neighbors and local governments.
You're making the argument that there is something inherent in professors that makes it more likely they will engage in sexual relations with people, which is problematic and strange.
> You're making the argument that there is something inherent in professors that makes it more likely they will engage in sexual relations with people, which is problematic and strange.
We know for a fact that it happens, and there have been recent sex scandals at the UC Santa Cruz, the university mentioned in the article. This is not a weird or unsubstantiated concern. And I never said there was something inherent to professors that causes it.
There is a risk that professors can be exposed to allegations of impropriety as a result of housing students. The university does not bear this risk for that. Nobody is justifying assault or improper relationships, but the point is that the universities solution to the housing problem in Santa Cruz has a number of complications that seem not to have been addressed.
Perhaps a better solution would be to reduce the student population and university size to what the local housing market and community could support, given opposition to construction of student housing. Obviously they’d need to eat humble pie for that to happen, which is why it’s not being discussed.
The much broader and more general problem is anything that could stem from a lack of appropriate boundaries between faculty and students. Sexual assault is just a worst case scenario in that category of problems. You are of course correct that someone who would do such a thing shouldn’t be teaching, but it’s much more reliable and pragmatic to simply have reasonable rules and boundaries than it is to determine with 100% accuracy what people are capable of. Not just to prevent the possibility of sex scandals, but to prevent the entire category of problems from being more of an issue than it already is.
The problem with your argument is you're conflating sexual misbehaviour (what OP said) with sexual assault. These are two fundamentally different things. If you take the time to consider some hypotheticals of a situation where beautiful young people are shacking up with someone (a significant level of closeness) I think you can see the problem.
How many "beautiful young people" want to have sex with 50 year old professors? If you think I'm crass stating it like that, then why did you have to bring up "beautiful young people" as some argument?
I'm actually tired of this discussion. My entire point is it's a red herring that distracts from the issues around housing.
> How many "beautiful young people" want to have sex with 50 year old professors? If you think I'm crass stating it like that, then why did you have to bring up "beautiful young people" as some argument?
Probably not that many (although it happens in grad school all the time), but let's invert the question: How many 50-year-old professors want to have sex with beautiful young people?
> I'm actually tired of this discussion. My entire point is it's a red herring that distracts from the issues around housing.
But it's not a red herring. It's a very real concern, and we know it's real because sexual misbehavior already happens between students and professors, including at UCSC! Do you honestly believe that it would not increase in prevalence if students and professors started living together?
Absolutely agree with your points. Especially given some of the recent high profile settlements regarding sexual misconduct at UCSC these emails seem poorly thought out.
> The real solution is to build more affordable student housing on or near campus, but that would require funds from the state government, which is unlikely to provide them.
Within the UC, all the housing must be self-funded; it needs to make enough money from residential payments over its lifetime to cover construction/maintenance/services.
With UCSC in the bay area, construction is incredibly expensive. This means that the campus literally cannot build affordable housing for students. They are currently building a 3000 space complex (currently held up by NIMBYism, but that's another topic) and the "cheapest" they can build for graduate students is around $1200 per month for a bedroom in a 4 bedroom apartment. Given that the graduate students are being paid ~$2000 a month this isn't a great situation.
UCSC is really in a bad spot. Either the state needs to stop mandating blanket enrollment increases across all campuses or it needs to step in and force Santa Cruz to build.
Yea, this is for sure an absolutely awful idea and I can’t imagine who would possibly give this the ‘OK’. This has to be breaking all sorts of university guidelines and policies. UCSC stands to lose more in lawsuits than they have to gain here. Not to mention this seems counterproductive to student safety and wellbeing.
My grandfather, a chemistry professor, used to lend out his basement to any of his grad students who had no place to stay. His experience was entirely positive! They were nice people, and it was good to have a new friend in the house.
Students living with professors isn't necessarily a terrible idea.
Big changes since I was there about a decade ago. I had a $1300 stipend as a CS PhD student, and rent for a modest studio on pacific avenue ate up about $750 of that. I was 2 blocks from the beach.
Pacific Avenue is the main strip downtown, and is relatively nice. In retrospect, I was getting a bargain.
Notably, non science and engineering grad students got smaller stipends. So it was tough for them even then, hopefully the university has raised their package since then.
I’ll also add than non-cs grad students did not get lucrative summer gigs to soften the blow. 3 months at Google can make life much easier the rest of the year.
What about this, as an immediate remedy, how about the state and the government (on some hypothetical day they care about this) incentivize sending students to other schools across the country, and then investing money into said schools to improve them?
Or even just other UCs. Merced/Irvine/Riverside are not experiencing housing crises at this level. Sending more students to UC Santa Cruz is just irresponsible.
Possibly wildly unpopular opinion: Offer relocation to academic staff to other UCs and sell the UC Santa Cruz property to developers, upzoned, and reinvesting the proceeds into the UC school system. It increases housing available, and it's financially beneficial to UC (which could buy up land for student housing around its other campuses, insulting it from this occurring in the future).
Sometimes you have to retreat when the sea (of rising property costs) is invading your costal property.
I think one thing that would help is to make sure the staff could still be affiliated with the more prestigious UC's so they can put that affiliation on articles. As asinine as that is, it would allow academics especially to be more willing to move.
I doubt very many professors at Santa Cruz would want to move unless they could work at a more prestigious university, and all of those are located in areas with high housing costs like Berkeley and Los Angeles. Actually, a lot of professors at UC Davis commute from the East Bay because they don't want to live in the Central Valley.
It's a pretty tall order to convince successful tenured professors living in a beachfront community, most of whom are homeowners and contribute to the NIMBYism of the area, to move somewhere else.
It's a pretty tall order to ask taxpayers to subsidize the cost of a college beachfront community. We could just close up UC Santa Cruz and call it a day, no relo offer on the table. If you can't terminate tenured professors because you've closed the facility down, buy them out with revenue from selling the campus.
Tax dollars for education should not subsidize expensive real estate markets. You can still have your job, we're not under any obligation to keep it within walking distance of your beach front property.
To be fair, I don't think the bulk of the cost of the university goes to the real estate of professors. That said, of course there should be incentives to get professors to move.
The problem is the need to subsidize student housing due to high real estate costs, not professors. If professors don't want to move, we're subsidizing them through student housing subsidization. Apologies if I didn't make that thought clear.
> Tax dollars for education should not subsidize expensive real estate markets.
How can that be avoided? Should we build every university in the middle of nowhere, and then move them around every 30 years because the university drew in enough people to cause housing to become expensive?
It can't be avoided. You should always be willing to evaluate the ongoing viability of a campus, regardless of location, and not consider any a sunk cost you could not possibly dispose of. Where does the requirement come from that a campus remain in the same location in perpetuity? There is no such requirement, just as a company might close a satellite office if the business requirements change.
Is popularity correlated with high costs? Looking at this list https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_univer... do College Station, Orlando, Columbus, Miami, Gainesville and Minneapolis carry significant premium as far as cost of living?
Miami might, but it seems like it’s more due to the beach proximity and tourism industry than FIU.
What? Who’s asking tax payers to pay for anything? The issue is “are we allowed to build new housing for all the people who want to come here” so far the answer inexplicably has been. “Nope, not allowed”
It would have an interesting affect on the next college community that refuses to allow building permits. It would very much be like these pro-sports teams in the US and how they treat cities. It could really go either way, but I guess it works for the NFL.
Why not just permit sufficient housing on campus? It’s not like there’s a lack of space. Take a virtual tour of the campus or look at an areal view. You could fit 3k new housing units into a thousand different empty spots on campus. The reason they can’t build is they’re being blocked. The reason they’re being blocked is the same reason there’s a housing crisis in the whole Bay Area. We’ve made it really easy to block new construction and really hard to build.
Can people affiliated with UCSC comment on this? I'm not aware if UCSC really has a leg up in terms of prestige compared to the big ones (Berkley, Santa Barbara, San Fransisco, LA...)
Well, UCSF doesn't have an undergraduate program, so it's unwise to directly compare their prestige to other UCs.
At least in computer science, UCSC has a decent reputation. Among UCs, computer science goes roughly Berkeley > LA/SD > SC/Davis/SB > the others. Non-computer science, I think Berkeley and UCLA are way above the rest except for isolated specific departments.
When I was at the UCs the percieved ranking among students was:
Top tier: Berkeley and UCLA, for sure
Second tier: most of the other ones; people love to argue about the order, but honestly most of them don't stand out above the others except for certain degree programs
Bottom tier: definitely includes UC Merced, and maybe UC Riverside
UC Merced opened in 2005 without many degree programs and faculty, and it's slowly growing. So its poor ranking is due to that more than anything else.
Assuming 18 year olds get around to doing this or even know to do this. At the very least, the university should make it clear the issues surrounding housing on campus.
Students who applied want to go there specifically. It would be hubris to think we could comprehend the 7 thousand individual reasons each student chose to go there. I’m not sure why the administration decided to accept more students than usual, but it’s a problem That exists even if you accept a normal number of applicants.
Every year more people move to economically vibrant areas in Northern California, but established land owning voters(and renters afraid of displacement) block every attempt to build new housing. This simple equation of demand being ten times supply pushes the price of housing up to insane levels and squeezes the least fortunate out the bottom.
Why can’t we just admit that we are ethically required to permit sufficient housing in our cities? (I mean permit in the literal senses of both to allow and to issue building permits for) If we fail to do that we squeeze out the poor, elderly, less skilled —exacerbating the homelessness crisis worsening traffic (since normal people like clerks, teachers and baristas have to commute from outside the city for jobs in the city) and creating a bland monoculture.
My immediate remedy is: how about we stop blocking every effort to build new housing?
My knee-jerk reaction: So a place that benefits from government guaranteed student loans and ever-higher tuition rates is asking the lowest paid (other than the adjuncts i suppose) to take on the burden of not only providing the education that the university profits from but also the room and board?
The article is short on details but I can't see this as anything other than a sad joke. If Santa Cruz is anything like a typical college town then there are buildings on campus or nearby that could be repurposed for this problem. Certainly there is money somewhere that could be used to purchase space (even though real-estate is at a premium) for this problem. After all, the University will have far more access to funds or loans.
However, that would come at a cost of the profits.
How myopic for them to even consider professors housing students to be an option.
>If Santa Cruz is anything like a typical college town then there are buildings on campus or nearby that could be repurposed for this problem. Certainly there is money somewhere that could be used to purchase space (even though real-estate is at a premium) for this problem.
Campus dorms are thousands of students over original capacity. All the lounge areas are converted to bedrooms, double rooms became triples and quads etc. Due to a long-standing feud with the city UCSC also cannot purchase any property in town that will house students. They are further restricted in where they can build on campus by both geological natural features, student protests (eg. 2 year tree sit that held up building in the 2000s), and also general NIMBYism. You are totally right in characterizing the situation as a sad joke. If only these emails were the extent of it..
If I understand the situation correctly, at the UCs most workers are not contracted out and are rather a unionized public workforce see AFSCME.
"AFSCME Local 3299 is the University of California’s largest employee union, representing more than 24,000 employees at UC’s 10 campuses, five medical centers, numerous clinics, research laboratories and UC Hastings College of the Law."
https://afscme3299.org/our_union/about_local_3299/
> asking the lowest paid (other than the adjuncts i suppose) to take on the burden of not only providing the education that the university profits from but also the room and board
I would hope the question that the faculty is asking is: Has the UCSC administration agreed to take any students into their homes?
it's not easy to grow the UCSC campus like that. There was an aggressive 25 year plan where they anticipated a campus multiple times the current size but it's not realistic to expect the town to accomodate it. It would also be super-unpopular to extensively develop the existing campus.
Here is the crux of the matter (in mathematical terms):
"university admitted about 7,000 students this year, up from 5,300 last year, according to the Santa Cruz Sentinel."
"The university is years away from building a planned 3,000 campus housing unit, but thousands of local residents have already signed a petition to stop the development"
So they planned on having 3000 more housing units (staff, students and additional personnel), they didn't get it. There is your shortage. The plan was flawed because it didn't account for the fact that local residents might not go along with it.
Pinning this on the tech industry is another example how lazy politicians push their problems on tech industry because it's a popular target.
They massively overadmitted, yes, but that wasn't the plan at all. Correctly identifying the matriculation rate is extremely difficult when most students are applying to 10-20 colleges, and of course only attending one. The obvious recourse would be to rescind admission for thousands of students, but the ill will generated by such an action would be extreme, as all the matriculants would have already lost the opportunity to attend the other colleges they were accepted to.
Santa Cruz isn't really the Silicon Valley metro area - it's in a different county which frequently isn't considered part of the Bay Area, the commute is more like 45 minutes than the 30 quoted, and there's only one road over the mountains, so if there's an accident on Highway 17 (which happens frequently) you're looking at 3+ hours to get over the hill. I had one or two coworkers who tried to live in Santa Cruz and work in Mountain View, and they lasted about 1-2 months before they just got a place on the peninsula. It's more common as a weekend getaway for engineers who worked at a company that IPO'd.
The real estate market is distinct from Silicon Valley for that reason too. It's expensive, but it's expensive because it's an attractive beach community on the CA coastline, and the inland (no beach access) houses are significantly cheaper than anything you could get in the Palo Alto/Mountain View/Sunnyvale area.
The real story here the university admitting 7000 students for 5300 spots, which is an epic admissions fail and will cause problems for any college town. I've heard of Berkeley (CA), Brandeis (MA), and Ithaca College (NY) all having similar issues in various years, with similar drastic housing measures.
Yep, I was going to mention how insignificant the commute is if you only do it once a week. I spent a number of years in the coastal communities around the area, mostly working from home or cafes for startups in either SF or SV/MTV.
The massive influx of moneyed people from the tech industry has had a substantial impact over the last 10-15 years, for the entire region.
Edit:
I just remembered a relevant experience I had two years ago:
While seeking a room to rent through the wet winter, I found a house in Felton (~10 miles into the woods, away from Santa Cruz and the coast) renting all the rooms for $800/mo each. The owner was living in a container in the yard, powered via extension cord! This was basically the cheapest option I could find, and it was a total shit show. One bathroom, 7 tenants, most college-aged, and the owner's 5 year old daughter was living in the living room while the owner was in the container. Even large closets were being rented as rooms.
Obviously I passed on this option, but it was quite illuminating of how much opportunity there was to capitalize on; this guy was risking his daughter sharing a house full of strangers without him even inside.
That same week I had a conversation with a young park ranger who had recently moved to Boulder Creek, which is even further into the woods like another 10-15 miles down a twisty road. She had just moved from the east coast and couldn't find anything affordable in Santa Cruz or Felton, and just barely affords a shared place in Boulder Creek.
I would have thought a society with a future would want to increase college attendance even if it increased housing supply that ate into profits on land ownership.
I would argue that if we now let land pricing affect the ability of the smartest and most energetic people in society to get the education they deserve, then we are up a creek. If even universities are disliked through nibyism then we are way up that creek.
We should not be putting more and more UC students in Santa Cruz, San Francisco, LA, and other high cost areas. For the love of god, expand the campuses in Davis, Merced, etc.
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[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 129 ms ] threadHowever, students living with professors is a terrible idea. There is already too much sexual misbehavior with weird power dynamics in academia, especially between professors and grad students, and this all happens without them living together. It would only get worse.
The real solution is to build more affordable student housing on or near campus, but that would require funds from the state government, which is unlikely to provide them.
Not only funds, but it would require a shift in the attitude of the locals towards such buildings.
You're making the argument that there is something inherent in professors that makes it more likely they will engage in sexual relations with people, which is problematic and strange.
We know for a fact that it happens, and there have been recent sex scandals at the UC Santa Cruz, the university mentioned in the article. This is not a weird or unsubstantiated concern. And I never said there was something inherent to professors that causes it.
Perhaps a better solution would be to reduce the student population and university size to what the local housing market and community could support, given opposition to construction of student housing. Obviously they’d need to eat humble pie for that to happen, which is why it’s not being discussed.
I'm actually tired of this discussion. My entire point is it's a red herring that distracts from the issues around housing.
Probably not that many (although it happens in grad school all the time), but let's invert the question: How many 50-year-old professors want to have sex with beautiful young people?
> I'm actually tired of this discussion. My entire point is it's a red herring that distracts from the issues around housing.
But it's not a red herring. It's a very real concern, and we know it's real because sexual misbehavior already happens between students and professors, including at UCSC! Do you honestly believe that it would not increase in prevalence if students and professors started living together?
> The real solution is to build more affordable student housing on or near campus, but that would require funds from the state government, which is unlikely to provide them. Within the UC, all the housing must be self-funded; it needs to make enough money from residential payments over its lifetime to cover construction/maintenance/services.
With UCSC in the bay area, construction is incredibly expensive. This means that the campus literally cannot build affordable housing for students. They are currently building a 3000 space complex (currently held up by NIMBYism, but that's another topic) and the "cheapest" they can build for graduate students is around $1200 per month for a bedroom in a 4 bedroom apartment. Given that the graduate students are being paid ~$2000 a month this isn't a great situation.
UCSC is really in a bad spot. Either the state needs to stop mandating blanket enrollment increases across all campuses or it needs to step in and force Santa Cruz to build.
Students living with professors isn't necessarily a terrible idea.
Pacific Avenue is the main strip downtown, and is relatively nice. In retrospect, I was getting a bargain.
Notably, non science and engineering grad students got smaller stipends. So it was tough for them even then, hopefully the university has raised their package since then.
I’ll also add than non-cs grad students did not get lucrative summer gigs to soften the blow. 3 months at Google can make life much easier the rest of the year.
Sometimes you have to retreat when the sea (of rising property costs) is invading your costal property.
It's a pretty tall order to convince successful tenured professors living in a beachfront community, most of whom are homeowners and contribute to the NIMBYism of the area, to move somewhere else.
Tax dollars for education should not subsidize expensive real estate markets. You can still have your job, we're not under any obligation to keep it within walking distance of your beach front property.
How can that be avoided? Should we build every university in the middle of nowhere, and then move them around every 30 years because the university drew in enough people to cause housing to become expensive?
Miami might, but it seems like it’s more due to the beach proximity and tourism industry than FIU.
At least in computer science, UCSC has a decent reputation. Among UCs, computer science goes roughly Berkeley > LA/SD > SC/Davis/SB > the others. Non-computer science, I think Berkeley and UCLA are way above the rest except for isolated specific departments.
Top tier: Berkeley and UCLA, for sure
Second tier: most of the other ones; people love to argue about the order, but honestly most of them don't stand out above the others except for certain degree programs
Bottom tier: definitely includes UC Merced, and maybe UC Riverside
UC Merced opened in 2005 without many degree programs and faculty, and it's slowly growing. So its poor ranking is due to that more than anything else.
Why can’t we just admit that we are ethically required to permit sufficient housing in our cities? (I mean permit in the literal senses of both to allow and to issue building permits for) If we fail to do that we squeeze out the poor, elderly, less skilled —exacerbating the homelessness crisis worsening traffic (since normal people like clerks, teachers and baristas have to commute from outside the city for jobs in the city) and creating a bland monoculture.
My immediate remedy is: how about we stop blocking every effort to build new housing?
The article is short on details but I can't see this as anything other than a sad joke. If Santa Cruz is anything like a typical college town then there are buildings on campus or nearby that could be repurposed for this problem. Certainly there is money somewhere that could be used to purchase space (even though real-estate is at a premium) for this problem. After all, the University will have far more access to funds or loans.
However, that would come at a cost of the profits.
How myopic for them to even consider professors housing students to be an option.
Campus dorms are thousands of students over original capacity. All the lounge areas are converted to bedrooms, double rooms became triples and quads etc. Due to a long-standing feud with the city UCSC also cannot purchase any property in town that will house students. They are further restricted in where they can build on campus by both geological natural features, student protests (eg. 2 year tree sit that held up building in the 2000s), and also general NIMBYism. You are totally right in characterizing the situation as a sad joke. If only these emails were the extent of it..
I'm pretty sure there are plenty of employees at UC SC who are paid a hell of a lot less than professor-rank academics.
Like cleaners, cooks, librarians, secretaries, security, maintenance staff.
"AFSCME Local 3299 is the University of California’s largest employee union, representing more than 24,000 employees at UC’s 10 campuses, five medical centers, numerous clinics, research laboratories and UC Hastings College of the Law." https://afscme3299.org/our_union/about_local_3299/
I would hope the question that the faculty is asking is: Has the UCSC administration agreed to take any students into their homes?
"The university is years away from building a planned 3,000 campus housing unit, but thousands of local residents have already signed a petition to stop the development"
So they planned on having 3000 more housing units (staff, students and additional personnel), they didn't get it. There is your shortage. The plan was flawed because it didn't account for the fact that local residents might not go along with it.
Pinning this on the tech industry is another example how lazy politicians push their problems on tech industry because it's a popular target.
The real estate market is distinct from Silicon Valley for that reason too. It's expensive, but it's expensive because it's an attractive beach community on the CA coastline, and the inland (no beach access) houses are significantly cheaper than anything you could get in the Palo Alto/Mountain View/Sunnyvale area.
The real story here the university admitting 7000 students for 5300 spots, which is an epic admissions fail and will cause problems for any college town. I've heard of Berkeley (CA), Brandeis (MA), and Ithaca College (NY) all having similar issues in various years, with similar drastic housing measures.
There are plenty of people that do it (at least in my bubble).
The massive influx of moneyed people from the tech industry has had a substantial impact over the last 10-15 years, for the entire region.
Edit:
I just remembered a relevant experience I had two years ago:
While seeking a room to rent through the wet winter, I found a house in Felton (~10 miles into the woods, away from Santa Cruz and the coast) renting all the rooms for $800/mo each. The owner was living in a container in the yard, powered via extension cord! This was basically the cheapest option I could find, and it was a total shit show. One bathroom, 7 tenants, most college-aged, and the owner's 5 year old daughter was living in the living room while the owner was in the container. Even large closets were being rented as rooms.
Obviously I passed on this option, but it was quite illuminating of how much opportunity there was to capitalize on; this guy was risking his daughter sharing a house full of strangers without him even inside.
That same week I had a conversation with a young park ranger who had recently moved to Boulder Creek, which is even further into the woods like another 10-15 miles down a twisty road. She had just moved from the east coast and couldn't find anything affordable in Santa Cruz or Felton, and just barely affords a shared place in Boulder Creek.
I would argue that if we now let land pricing affect the ability of the smartest and most energetic people in society to get the education they deserve, then we are up a creek. If even universities are disliked through nibyism then we are way up that creek.