Student Council’s Building and Grounds Committee introduced a resolution last night encouraging the Housing Division and the Board of Visitors to charge students living on Grounds a flat fee for unlimited laundry services. The change is meant to allow low-income students to pay for laundry expenses through financial aid rather than out of pocket. That ability would likely be useful to many students, but there is a better way to accomplish it. Council should reject the current resolution and instead ask the University to offer an optional laundry fee to students living on Grounds that would be added to their Cavalier Advantage accounts.
For the proposed plan to work, the Housing Division would have to charge each student the average amount spent on laundry. Council is conducting a survey this week to determine that amount. As Council President Matt Schrimper admitted, some students who would otherwise spend less on laundry would be charged a higher fee to pay for other students who use the laundry facilities more often.
Students’ laundry needs vary widely. Some do laundry twice a week, while others make do with two loads a month. Some students who live on Grounds do not do laundry there at all, either by doing it at their parents’ on the weekends or by wearing the same hoodie all semester. Students should not be punished for being economical.
In fact, laundry fees should be set up in a way that encourages students to do fewer loads of laundry. Charging students money to do laundry forces them to take into account the costs of the water and electricity they are using and helps limit the University’s environmental impact. If students were charged a flat fee to do as much laundry as they wanted, they would no longer have any reason not to waste those resources to wash a single outfit.
Schrimper said Council’s environmental sustainability committee does not think this will be a problem, because new washing machines the University just installed are more environmentally friendly. Their use might mean the total resources used in laundry facilities will go down compared to last year, even if the new fee structure is implemented — but that does not mean the flat fee itself would not have an adverse affect on the environment. As anyone who has taken ECON 201 can tell you, reducing the cost of an additional load of laundry would increase the consumption of laundry services.
Allowing unlimited laundry use would also invite students to abuse it. Students with friends who live off-Grounds could swipe them in to the laundry facilities at no cost to either of them.
Instead of the current proposal, the Housing Department should keep the pay-as-you-go system and set up an optional laundry fee in addition to the normal housing fee. This would allow low-income students to pay for laundry through financial aid — the whole point of Council’s proposal. Rather than giving students who pay the fee unlimited access to laundry facilities, however, the Housing Division could simply deposit that fee in the students’ Cavalier Advantage accounts, or create a new account similar to Plus Dollars and Art$ Dollars that could be used only for laundry. This would give students an incentive to conserve resources — the fewer loads of laundry they do, the more late-night trips to The Crossroads they can afford. Because it would be optional, this system would avoid punishing students who do less laundry. Students who need to do more can simply pay for it themselves.
Schrimper readily admitted the unfairness inherent in a flat fee but said, “We think the sheer convenience and the socioeconomic advantage will make up for that.” By tweaking its proposal, Council could achieve those goals without the drawbacks of its current plan.
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