On Dec. 7, 2022, Central Student Government unanimously passed a resolution encouraging the University of Michigan to include the cost of laundry in room and board. Though well intentioned, there are significant climate, capacity and efficiency issues posed by this proposal. By untethering laundry from market forces, students are incentivized to use laundry for, say, a single shirt, which would both be extremely wasteful of water while simultaneously blocking other students from using the laundry machines. While CSG raises important points about the inability of students to offset the cost of laundry with financial aid, their proposed system is not the way to achieve equity. We, instead, suggest that the University could include a certain number of additional Blue Bucks in room and board, and ensure those Blue Bucks can be used for laundry. Alternatively, they could adopt a policy in the framework of the printing stipend, wherein every freshman is given some quantity of free laundry.
CSG’s plan calls to increase student housing costs by $100 (to a number seemingly chosen based on, among other sources, a 2014 article in The University Daily Kansan) at a flat fee for every student — allowing financial aid to cover the cost of laundry for eligible students. In return, the University would make laundry machines available free of charge to all M-Housing residents. Both this Editorial Board and CSG acknowledge that laundry reform is necessary; there exists compelling reasons for eligible students to be able to use financial aid to cover the cost of laundry, alleviating some of the hidden costs associated with college.
CSG’s proposed system would create a laundry system similar to the dining halls: Students pay a large up-front cost at the beginning of the year and are free to use unlimited swipes through the term. Yet the prospect of giving students unlimited laundry swipes raises several concerns. Without the cost to limit student laundry use, crowding in laundry rooms would increase as well as the amount of wasted water and detergent.
Luckily, there are multiple solutions to this problem that allow students to: A) use financial aid on laundry costs to utilize market forces to prevent overuse, and B) not be penalized for frequenting the laundry rooms less often. It’s a system we are all familiar with: Blue Bucks — but with an increased allowance to account for laundry.
Raising the Blue Bucks limit to be inclusive of laundry fees supports the variability with which students do laundry, and is already used by other universities. An additional, say, $50 raise in the allotted Blue Bucks per semester places more autonomy in students’ hands. Students would have the power to delegate a portion of Blue Bucks to spend on cleaning their wardrobe and use the remaining balance on other University amenities. In this instance, students wouldn’t feel compelled to compensate for the flat fee they already spent on laundry to “get their money’s worth.” The Blue Bucks alternative also teaches freshmen important skills about budgeting for what they need and spending on what they want.
Because Blue Bucks is already a campus-wide currency loaded onto one’s Mcard, there would be little-to-no extra transition costs to add $50 to every student living in campus housing’s accounts. The financial and software systems are already in place to support laundry subsidization, and it is clear that this alternative can be easily adopted and trackable as early as next semester.
Despite the merits of a Blue Bucks increase, this solution is, in part, fraught. By tying laundry to meal plans via Blue Bucks, you run the risk of a freshman — completely new to the world of budgeting — unloading their entire laundry allotment on Panda Express and Sweetwaters within the first week of the semester. Fortunately, another option, an independent stipend solution, could be to create a separate fund for laundry, similar to the student printing budget.
U-M students currently receive a $24 printing budget per term that can be utilized on any University printer. Students are also able to add more funds to their printing budget if they reach their $24 limit. If the University determined that each student could receive a $50 laundry budget per semester, for example, market forces would still limit laundry room use and congestion, and frequent washers would still have the option to add more funds to their laundry budget throughout the semester. Students would have fewer options to use excess laundry funds, but by implementing a stipend exclusively for laundry, we eliminate the risk of spending laundry money for other costs, such as eating out.
The new CSG proposal does not address the cost of additional resources needed on the periphery of just one washing and drying cycle, including dryer sheets, detergent, bleach, fabric softener and more. An increased Blue Bucks allowance accounts for these additional costs because of its premise that students will ultimately buy what they need — including cleaning supplies. If CSG hoped to minimize laundry inequality on campus, they could use some of their substantial budget to subsidize detergent costs.
There may be better solutions to this issue than the stipend or Blue Bucks alternatives; however, the CSG proposal for complete laundry subsidization lacks a deeper consideration of student habits, transition costs and sustainability. To promote a more inclusive and cost-effective mechanism for facilitating dorm living, the University needs to reconsider, in some way, the rising cost of laundry services. And with an endowment of over $10 billion more than neighboring, free-laundry institutions like Michigan State University and the Ohio State University, the University’s time to come up with a solution is up. As cleaner habits lead to improved academic performance, an effective plan to diminish barriers to laundry would proliferate the success of students in the classroom going forward.
The Daily’s Editorial Board, hosted within the Opinion section, meets weekly to discuss issues important to our community. The Michigan Daily is committed to publishing a diversity of Op-Eds & Letters to the Editor. Submission instructions can be found on our website.
Editors’ note: An earlier version of the piece stated that CSG’s annual budget is $800,000. This figure is outdated. An earlier version of this piece likewise implied that CSG’s only support for the $100 figure was a piece from the University Daily Kansan. Though the article for that publication is cites the $100 figure, there were more sources for the dollar range.