Over the past few decades the cost of higher education has skyrocketed. With increased competition between students and additional costs of student housing, why is it ethical to have new students living in hazardous conditions?
In a 2022 survey by the American Cleaning Institute, 72% of students came completely unprepared or somewhat prepared to clean their dorm rooms.
The survey unveiled that lack of time and motivation, roommates getting in the way and not knowing how to clean properly are all factors that are keeping students living in unclean conditions.
“It would take up time for students trying to clean their door room themselves, that they could be using for activities such as studying or working,” Danielle Karimpanal, junior, said.
Following the COVID-19 pandemic students returned to in-person learning, followed by hundreds of reports of mold and dampness inside of dorm rooms. Any amount of mold inside a building is considered dangerous and can cause long term illnesses such as pneumonia, asthma and other respiratory infections.
“People with asthma might struggle in stuffy and unclean rooms. In serious cases students might even struggle with asthma attacks,” Sarah Lucchesi, sophomore, said.
Poor indoor air quality can have short term solutions such as dehumidifiers, but with more funding, colleges can upgrade facilities and install HVAC systems.
For many colleges, they simply cannot allocate the amount of funds needed to cover the vast incidents of maintenance and renovations needed in dormitories.
“It is unacceptable for colleges to be neglecting the cleanliness of their facilities like this, students are paying to live in these dorms. For colleges to be brushing this off and not caring about the dorms is just unacceptable,” Lucchesi said.
Hazardous dormitories became a topic of conversation in mid-November of 2018, following the death of Olivia Shea Paregold, a student at the University of Maryland. The university had neglected the dorms of over 600 students in Elkton Hall, one of the university’s dormitory buildings.
Parents of students turned to social media groups to show their concern of the conditions that these students were living in. At one point all students were evacuated from the dormitory and the university hired an outside specialist to remove the mold present in the dorms, as well as an engineer to examine the cause of the mold outbreak.
The experts would come to find that Elkton Hall’s cooling systems, installed in 2011, were not designed to remove moisture and humidity from the air, causing the building to be prone to mold.
“My daughter’s dorm was old, but clean. There was dust in the vents, but nothing incredibly off-putting. Even the bathroom, that is shared on the floor, was cleaner than I expected. My issue is with how cold the room has to be in order for mold not to grow. It is 58 degrees and they have to empty the dehumidifier 3-4 times a week,” Lillian Gilbert, Jupiter High teacher and mother of a student at the University of Florida, said.
After multiple visits to the emergency room and countless rounds of testing, Paregold was diagnosed with adenovirus. Just 15 days after detecting the virus, Paregol was pronounced dead. Doctors listed her cause of death as organ failure, acute respiratory distress syndrome and adenovirus.
“I had a former student who had to be hospitalized because of mold at the University of Florida; she had to move during her second semester to a different dorm,” Gilbert said.
Following the incident, students at Elkton Hall were still skeptical of the university’s effort to remove the mold from the dorms.
At least 30 students were sickened by the adenovirus at the University of Maryland. This level of neglect and mistreatment shows reasons as to why cleaning college dorm rooms need to be cleaned prior to move in dates.
