Jasmine Frazier
Comp 106
4 December 2009
Prof Ann-Yerks
Commuter Blues: Housing 101
Imagine this; you wake up to a knock at your door. There is a boldly typed pink slip. It carries the disturbing information that you have 30 days to evacuate your apartment. Even though you worked overtime for 3 weeks you’re still behind on the bills, what a way to start your day. You try to stuff the news into the back of your brain, and rush off to class. When you get to campus, it seems as if the student population left their house the same time as you, picked the same class day and time because the parking wars have begun at the unusual time of 9:00 in the morning. You arrive to class 30 minutes late, coincidently on the day you have an exam, 15 point mark off. Your 3 class day is now over. You rush to an 8 hour shift that barely gets you by. After a long day at work, its time to get some rest. But wait there’s more. You turn the ignition and your car won’t start.
This situation doesn’t include half of the complications commuter students encounter. These students have financial aid, jobs, cars, and their education to worry about. Furthermore, students have the most difficult time with housing. What causes students to go through financial problems during college? For commuter students, the burden of keeping a job to pay for housing, even if that means working 8 hours a day to make ends meet, or even worse falling asleep in the middle of class. Have you ever wondered the result of having housing at the University of Michigan-Dearborn? If you don’t have trouble with housing, can you imagine what it must be like to have a full time job while going to school full time? These are questions that I will attempt to answer by collecting data from students, resources and teachers. Above all, I will discover if housing at the University of Michigan-Dearborn will benefit a student’s academic and social progress? Whether you have the commuter blues or not, explore my trip back through memory lane and how I gathered information about commuting through articles, students, and teachers.
My situation is a little different than the anonymous student that is discussed in the first paragraph. Before I started college my family moved 4 times in one year. Before I knew I would be in an unstable environment, I had already been accepted into the university. I even accepted my award letter for financial Aid. When I first started college I had so many financial problems, including housing, that I was on the verge of dropping out. These financial problems began to affect my grades. When I failed a course, I knew it was over. I asked myself, am I the only one losing my mind? Am I in this alone? I didn’t think about digging for information until my sophomore year. We had to choose a topic and collect information to form a research paper. Immediately I knew housing would be my research topic since it’s relevant to my life.
I took advantage of the mini assignments that lead up to the research paper. When we had to write summaries of 3 different articles, I chose the subject off campus living. I took this as an opportunity to earn a good grade while digging for information about my topic. To my surprise, I found a few articles that were related to housing. “And a roof over their heads: the history of women’s housing at the University of Michigan through 1940” was the title of the article. This article was published in 2003 by Louise August. It discussed the biased attitudes against female students at the University. Residents around the University would help the students with housing by renting out rooms in their homes. However, they would not rent to female students because they thought that they would disturb the everyday routine of their home (August 1). They discovered that the women were quieter and neater than the men. This information was important to me because I helped me realize that housing has been an issue for years for the University. Not only has it provided me with the history of a problem that I’m researching, it showed me that housing has been an issue for students at Michigan for 69 years. This article also provides information on why the President at that time didn’t want housing at all. He suggests that it lead to drinking and gambling. When I first encountered this I was hesitant about residential halls, but I thought to myself that students are going to drink and gamble whether there is an absence of housing or not.
The next step in the process of digging for information about housing was to produce a survey. I knew that my target was the students at U of M-Dearborn. However I believed my target was to general. So I said to myself, “What groups have the most difficult time with off campus living”? Immediately I thought of freshmen and seniors. It was time to collect results. I emailed all the students on campus. In addition, I went on facebook.com and sent personal messages to students in the U of M Dearborn network. I knew this would not be an easy task because when I woke up the next morning, I received only 2 responses to my survey. Even though the quantity was small, the quality was huge. All the participants said that on a scale of 1 to 5, 5 being most affected, most of the students rated a 4 on how working has affected their grades. They also said that if the University had housing on campus, they would live in them. As I kept reading the responses 4 out of 8 students said that housing would be beneficial to student’s success rate. One student went a step further and said it would be extremely beneficial. This survey doesn’t generalize the whole campus, but to see how students felt about housing, suggest that housing is a concern, it’s just hidden. To know that all of them would stay on campus suggests that they would be better off living in a dorm. However, this part of the experience taught me not to focus only on freshman and seniors, but junior and sophomore students as well. The results were 33% sophomore and 44% junior.
The next step was to come up with questions for an interview. I knew that Suzette Crandall from the Housing and Referral office would be a great interviewee. I knew that she would give me good resources for my topic. In summary, Suzette agreed that housing would be beneficial to students also. She attended the University of Michigan-Dearborn, and struggled her way through school. After the interview she showed me a couple of articles that the school composed about off campus living called “Living on their own”. This article was published in 2007 in the Michigan Journal. Two UM-D student’s talk about what it’s like to live on their own. Julie Walker, who is a 2007 UM-D graduate, says she went “from people couches in basements, to tiny over priced bedrooms with silly rules” (1). She talks about how she saved enough money to move out on her own. She described it as her cozy dungeon (Walker 1). When it was time for dinner she says “should I mix canned green beans in with my eggs or those questionable mushrooms I splurged on” (1)? Furthermore, she moved numerous of times, “eight to be exact” (1). This information is important because this article gives evidence that students would benefit from housing. She would not move eight times if she was provided with a stable place to live. She wouldn’t even have to eat questionable mushrooms because she would have money to buy unquestionable food.
So is my question answered? Will housing benefit a student’s academic and social progress? There is not enough information collected to come to a conclusion. However it’s a major start to a potential project. There is even evidence of this project. The University is thinking about bringing back residential halls. In 2008 Alyssa Ryerson wrote an article named “University seeking input on student housing plan”. I found that The University of Michigan has begun to look into creating housing for its students. It states “the university has already taken steps toward the development of student housing in the near future, including focus groups and surveys” (Ryerson 2). It goes further about the surveys and its purpose. The purpose was to find out where the students live, how long is their drive to school and who they live with. This article taught me that housing has already been thought about and there are steps that are being taken.
There are still questions I want to ask. Such as how soon are they thinking about provided housing? Where would it be located? I know that the economy would change for the city because the population would increase dramatically. A population spurt would bring more money to improve the economy. Based on the information gathered, there is still work to be done so that future students won’t have to go through what I have gone through.
Works Citied
"Living on their own." Michigan journal [Dearborn, MI] 2007, late ed., sec. 6: 6. Print.
Louise August. "AND A ROOF OVER THEIR HEADS: The History of Women's Housing at the University of Michigan through 1940. " American Educational History Journal 30.(2003): 143-150. Research Library, ProQuest. Web. 10 Dec. 2009.
Ryerson, Alyssa. "University seeking input on student housing plans." Michigan Journal [Dearborn] 29 Jan. 2008, News sec.: 1. Print.
