8 Reasons you should not go (or send your child) to a Residential College.

A Residential College means that they have the right to force you to live on campus for the entire 4 years and you must check with them if you want to live off campus. They can and probably will deny you permission to leave and charge you automatically.

1. You will never learn how to pay rent. Finding an apartment, signing a decent lease, budgeting for rent. Forget about that if you live in a dorm room for four years. Where will that money go? Beer. Maybe new purses. Don’t expect people to be responsible if they’re never trusted with responsibility.

2. You will have to move 4 times a year. Most resident halls don’t stay open during the long Christmas break. This means you have to move everything you will need for an entire month home for Christmas break and then back to school after break is over. This is on top of moving home for summer break.

3. You will never learn how to cook. Yes, you can always microwave ramen, and you will be able to have one of those cute little refrigerators in your room, but living off Easy Mac will get old after four years. When you finally get to the real world, you will learn embarrassingly how to cook.

4. You will be locked into paying a high room and board rate. What if your enterprising student finds a cheap apartment? What if you don’t mind living on Ramen and eggs, and don’t need all that cafeteria food? Forget it. You must pay for room and board. Basically you pay to feed unlimited chicken fingers to 250 lb freshman linebackers.

5. You will not be able to keep a job. As noted above you must move out of the odds of you having a job that will let you leave for a month is slim. Good luck finding a prime University job. Those are very competitive and probably don’t pay that well to begin with.

6. You will have to move in with your parents again. What happens once you graduate? My school kicked us out of our campus apartment THE VERY DAY of graduation. There was my father dressed in a suit helping tote my dirty laundry to his Jeep. We had little time to look for jobs or new apartments during the finals, so where did I end up? Back at home.
   

7. You will be going to graduate school. What happens to people who don’t have the social skills to live on their own? More school! YAY!

8. You will never learn the responsibility needed to become a functioning human being. All of these skills are life skills are things you should learn throughout a couple of years
   

Please, help us out and share any experiences you have had with residential housing and moving off campus.