Haves and have-nots in the dorms...

A Harvard Crimison editorial on a dorm cleaning service has gotten lots of publicity on the web, ie from OpinionJournal (scroll down to "underclassmen"). A dorm-cleaning service has been started at Harvard, and some Harvard students think it increases the class divide at Harvard.

The college I work at, and graduated from, has quite a few students with money. A recent walk through a student parking lot revealed cars that included a late-model Jaguar XJ-6 and a new BMW 3-series. My sophmore and junior years in college were spent driving a 15-year old K-car. So I don't think that any class divide at schools is hidden.

Nor is hiring help to clean dorms a new thing - a couple years ago on move-in day I overheard the parents of a student whose computer I was working on talking about hiring cleaning people for their kid's dorm room.

But dorm-room, or roomate conflicts in general, aren't restricted to class. Cleaning can be a big issue even if you aren't paying someone to do it, if one roomate is neat and the other doesn't really care (like myself). But I think things like sleeping schedules, friends, girlfriends/boyfriends, study schedules, different attitudes towards studying with music and TV on, and a host of other things cause way more roomate conflicts than money.