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That's exactly the kind of response schools are going for and what they say they need to stay competitive. "This is an arms race," says Sandy Baum, a professor of economics at Skidmore College who conducts the Annual Survey of Colleges for the College Board. With state budgets and private donations slashed, schools are desperate to fill classrooms with tuition-paying students, particularly those who can afford full fare. Dorms are not only one of the few healthy sources of revenue, but also a major selling point. "It's a matter of survival for some institutions," says Tom Hier of Biddison Hier, a student-housing planning firm based in Washington. "If your competitors are building, you have to be on the leading edge too."
Michigan State University surveyed its students to find out how to keep them from moving off campus and taking their housing dollars with them. This resulted in the renovation and upgrade of older dorms, including Robert S. Shaw Hall. Carmen Ornelas, 21, and her sister Sara, 19, both sophomores, decided to live there because they like brushing their teeth while watching soaps on the bathroom TV and sauntering upstairs to the Jacuzzi. Shaw manager Carol Noud admits the "therapeutic jet tub," as school officials prefer to call it, has some parents worried. "One mom did say to me, 'I want you to promise me only one person will be using that tub at a time,'" Noud says, laughing. "Like we can control our students."
Top schools feel less pressure to house students like sheiks. "Upper-tier schools don't have to work as hard," says consultant Hier. "If you're Harvard, you're never going to have to worry. I went to my 20year reunion at Brown, and nothing had changed but the paint." Even so, Cornell, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania are among the Ivies spending millions to spiff up their dorms. Stanford University is in the middle of a $300 million housing renovation. Still, says Rodger Whitney, executive director of Stanford's student housing, "We're not going in the direction of providing what I call country-club facilities."
Schools that do provide them are, some say, creating a two-tier system--kids who can afford the extra luxury touches and those who can't. Even without a course in class differences, the students get it. Charity Jeffery, 21, says she ended up moving away from some friends when she settled into Seattle Pacific University's $14.4 million, ski-lodge-style Emerson Hall. "Emerson, right away, was referred to as the rich-kid dorm," she says. "I had to separate from friends who went to another dorm because they couldn't all afford to live in Emerson." Some schools take steps to avoid such rifts. Michigan State charges the same fee for all dorms, regardless of extra frills. The University of Georgia awards nicer dorm rooms to students based on factors like grades and plans to start need-based scholarships to help poorer students pay for them.