Laundry is a necessity. Yet it is not included in the tuition of boarding students, making clean clothes an additional expense to all boarders. In the 2023-2024 school year, students returned to a rise in tuition alongside the unsound laundry machines charging an extra 25 cents compared to the prior years.
To run a cycle in the washer or dryer students must pay $1.25. Meaning that on average, a student is spending $2.50 cents on one load of laundry—that’s if the dryers work properly.
Across campus, many boarding students in Marshall Field, Ferry Hall and Atlass Hall are constantly opening the dryer doors to soggy clothes.
Adjusting to this inconvenience, students have alternated to a more efficient method by dividing one load of washing into two loads for drying or by running the machine twice. Basic math proves that the once $2.50 cents price now changes to $3.75 cents when having to dry one’s clothes twice. For those who both wash and dry two loads of laundry, one washing day could total $7.50 cents.
The dorms are roughly open for 37 weeks this school year. For students who do two loads of laundry per week, a typical amount, the total cost of laundry through the two semesters could easily add up to $277.50 cents. No matter the circumstances, that is too much money.
These high prices are especially concerning for students that are provided financial aid. For students who are in these situations, money can be limited and instead of using those funds to purchase school supplies, clothes, and other basic necessities, it is instead spent on washing clothes.
What’s even worse is that some students don’t have credit or debit accounts to link up to the PayRange system to pay the washers and dryers. In that case, students are left foraging for quarters. Coming from experience, finding 10 quarters on campus is a daunting task to do each week in order to have some clean clothes. It could also be uncomfortable for a student to have to reach out to a teacher asking for help to pay for laundry. The last thing any person would want is for a student without the proper resources to be forced to hand wash or to just not do any washing at all.
Overall, LFA students deserve the right to feel clean without losing hundreds of dollars each year to the greedy washers and dryers in each of our dorms. By providing a free laundry service on campus, the students would no longer have to face these financial challenges. Having clean clothes would be promised to all students, something that should already be in place.
