All halls on main campus of Nottingham are catered. York has small number of catered halls, as does Exeter. Birmingham has ‘meal plan’ which suggests that even if you are catered, you might not eat at the same place regularly or where you live, losing that continuity of seeing the same people every meal time. Most of Durham colleges are catered and Oxford and Cambridge colleges too.
Catering is expensive. At Durham it is an additional £92 per week…but that is 3 meals per day, 7 days a week. That’s still expensive though and takes the price of many college accommodation to close to £10k. However, on the other side, catered halls often have shorter lets, so you will pay for less weeks.
Personally, I think you get the most typical experience by doing what most freshers do at that particular uni. In Durham, most are in catered colleges. At Nottingham, most freshers are in catered halls if studying on the main campus. They will still learn to cook if they can’t already, in the 2nd year. Not doing it for 1 year won’t impact their final culinary skills.
I’d also be interested in the actual set-up of catered and self catering. For self catering, is there social space, how many rooms per flat and is there scope for easy mixing of those in different flats. To be honest, the chance that the 6 people you share a flat with are ‘your’ people is pretty small. It seems there’s a bigger chance to find ‘your’ people in a dining room of 300, but only if you actually sit with a range of people and not just those in your corridor or flat.
What no-one wants is their teen sitting in their room with the door shut and being online most evenings and never seeeing anyone. Getting out and bumping into people in corridors or kitchens or on the way to the bathroom, or heading over the place where meals are served, especially in the early days where everyone is keen to actually meet lots of people, is what you want.
Being old and from the time when most uni accommodation was catered, I think I can see the benefits that delivered. Common meal times can be inconvenient (although I notice breakfast tends to be across a good couple of hours now and dinner the same) and mean you don’t choose exactly what to eat at every meal……but is that really a big problem? There will always be some choice and having some kind of structure for another year of when meals are and being ‘forced’ into a community-based timetable of meals, can deliver lots of benefits of structure to the day and opportunities to meet with people. Don’t we all think that eating and chatting other people is absolutely key a key thing in family life or social life generally?
Persoanlly I think this thing about ‘make everything exactly how you want it individually’ isn’t great for young adults. That sense of not being willing to try different foods or only being able to eat a very limited range of foods or needing to eat at exactly the time they want and having 100% flexibility, whilst presented as a benefit, probably helps make more people insular and struggle to form friendships. Uni isn’t the time for living in a flat on your own and eating alone and spending 48 hours alone at the weekend, with only the internet.
So, I think that sharing a bathroom is fine. They will do it the following year anyway. Most do it at home. Those who do share quickly realise it’s not a disaster. Part of growing up is going outside your comfort zone ….might mean sharing a toilet with someone else, eating a meal you don’t like, talking with people you would never have mixed with at school. Lots of teens are flexible and up for this stuff already. Others like what they know. Some might have additional needs, which mean sharing etc really isn’t suitable, but for many, it’s a good thing and they should be encouraged to be willing to try new things.
The final thing I’m thinking about, is not being totally flexible about the budget and setting it after accommodation is chosen, but giving a budget ahead of accommodation being chosen. I don’t want my DC to choose the accommodation regardless of price. I want them to look at the options and know they will have £11k or whatever, of minimum maintenance loan and our top-up, and to consider what they can ‘get’ with that money. So, if they choose en-suite and catered, they know how much there will be left for each week of the year. I’ve known friends with older kids who said their kids chose en-suite without looking at the let length in terms of week, or extra cost of en-suite, and realised they could have had an extra £40 per week to spend if they’d chosen slightly differently. Even for those with very high budgets, I think there’s real merit in them knowing the total budget upfront and making some choices with that in mind. I think it’s less helpful for parent to tell them to choose what they’d like,then set an amount per week they need for spending and just top up to that level. But everyone does it differently I know.