Jason Bentsen grew up in Aurora and goes to college in Elgin. Although his family’s home is fairly close to Judson College, Bentsen lives in one of the two men’s dorms on the campus along the banks of the Fox River.
“From a social aspect, it is more fun living on campus,” said Bentsen, 24. “It is easier to study too. Everybody is right here. You’re near the professors, the library, other students.”
Administrators at two northwest suburban colleges are seeing an increase in residential students. And these colleges are accommodating a growing number of students like Bentsen who, in the past, typically lived at home and commuted to classes.
The reasons for choosing dorm living are varied. There is more involvement in college life and a sharper focus on education. Students in dorms often create lifelong friendships and must learn how to get along with others. And, most important, students gain a sense of responsibility by living away from home.
“We try to provide a living and learning environment,” said Kiersten Seeman, residence director at Ohio Hall on the Judson campus.
Two four-year colleges in the northwest suburbs offer housing options for their students. Students at Judson College share rooms in single-sex dormitories, and students at Christian Life College in Mt. Prospect are housed in converted single-family dwellings. Both are small private colleges and cannot be equitably compared with the campus living situations at large universities. But the schools do offer students the same opportunities to participate fully in college life.
“I think if you are commuting to college, you’re not getting the whole experience,” Bentsen said.
More than half of Judson’s 751 undergraduates live on campus, said Warren Anderson, the college’s director of housing.
“We encourage students to live on campus,” he said. “To best experience all the college has to offer, you should spend time on campus and in the residential halls. It’s not to say you can’t have a good experience as a commuter, but there are time constraints.”
Judson was founded in 1920 in Chicago and opened its Elgin campus in 1963. The Christian liberal arts college serves students from throughout the Midwest but, in recent years, also has begun to attract local students from the surrounding suburbs.
Many of those local students are choosing to live on campus because it is easier to plug into life at the college, Anderson said. “Colleges operate on their own clocks, and student relationships exist within a 24-hour-a-day dynamic,” he said.
“The advantage is in being connected,” added Seeman. “Commuter students come to class, but they don’t have those casual times, eating lunch, chatting with other students or just hanging out.”
Communal living, however, takes some getting used to. Privacy is a big issue for students at both Judson and Christian Life, and the No. 1 issue for new students is getting used to sharing a bathroom with other strangers.
At Ohio Hall, which is home to 100 freshman women, two students share a room and two rooms share a bathroom.
“It’s better than a communal bathroom,” said Teresa Reyna, 18, of Marengo. “You don’t have to walk down the hall. But at first it was really awkward.” She said it took a couple of days for the women to find their own comfort levels in sharing a bathroom and to arrange their timing and toiletries to everyone’s satisfaction.
The red brick Ohio Hall features a round foyer with a domed ceiling and a mahogany check-in desk at the right of the entrance.
Hattie Chase’s and Jacquetta Wright’s room came furnished with two beds, two dressers and two desks. The two students provided the bed coverings, curtains and throw rugs; tacked up posters and pictures; and stacked the televisions, stereos and mini-refrigerators in one corner.
Now the small closets burst with clothes, and hardly an inch of wall space in the room is left. Plastic milk crates nailed to one wall serve as storage for Wright’s stuffed animals, and the wall next to Chase’s bed is dominated by a bright yellow smiley face. Books and papers piled on the desks in the center of the small room help delineate each student’s space, although on a recent afternoon Chase’s nap is repeatedly interrupted by visitors to Wright’s side of the room.
“This is normal,” said Chase, of Antioch. “After about a month, though, I got used to it.”
Wright of Canton is getting ready to go to lunch with suitemates Reyna and Katie Olsen, 18, of Madison, Wis. The four students wander in and out of each others’ rooms through the connecting bathroom.
Practicing bathroom etiquette is the easy part, Olsen said. It is adjusting to other people that takes time. “I don’t think I talked to anyone the first week,” she said.
Added Reyna: “You’re meeting all these new people and you just don’t know if you’re going to get along with each other.”
Living in campus housing, even at a small school, gets a student more involved in campus life. “When I was in high school, I was a study freak. I never went anywhere,” said Paula Biffert, 21, a senior at Christian Life College. “Living with other people pushes you to make friends and plan activities together.”
“But it can be too easy to do things,” said Christian Life student Caroline Jannson, 21, of Karlskrona, Sweden. “There is always someone who wants to do something. So you need self-discipline.”
Residential students at the ministerial training school live in two homes across from the suburban campus: the women in a two-story white frame house and the men in a sprawling ranch.
Christian Life was founded 45 years ago in Chicago and relocated to the northwest suburbs in 1976. The Mt. Prospect campus serves approximately 100 full- and part-time students, and 16 students live in campus housing, said Wayne Wachsmuth, academic dean and director of housing at Christian Life.
The eight women residents share a five-room house with two bathrooms.
“I’ve pretty much had to share all my life,” Biffert said. “For others I know it can be difficult.”
Jannson is a freshman at the college. “This is my first time in the U.S.A. I had lived alone, so there are sometimes problems,” she said, especially because the residents are also responsible for cooking, cleaning and other chores. “But the girls meet in the middle. We compromise.”
Learning to manage relationships is one aspect of dorm living, and the experience can have a beneficial impact on other relationships. “My parents and I get along better since I moved out of the house,” Wright said.
On the Judson campus, in addition to Ohio Hall, 150 sophomore, junior and senior women live in Volkman Hall. Volkman features apartment-style living with four to eight women sharing a suite with a common living area and one or two baths. Male students are housed in Wilson Hall in an arrangement similar to Ohio Hall and on the 7th floor of Lindner Center, a former Ramada Inn.
The Lindner Center has the advantage of being the only dorm with central air conditioning, and it will eventually house 300 students. Three men share a suite with its own bathroom. Laundry facilities are at one end of the floor across from a common area that, in addition to the requisite TV and VCR, also features a sink, stove and full-size refrigerator.
Senior Scott Graffius, 21, of New Jersey is the residence assistant for the Lindner Center. “I spent three years in the other dorm. This is nice and new, and it has a view,” he said.
A large poster of Michael Jordan is tacked to the door of Bentsen’s room, and the Bulls motif is carried out throughout the room he shares with two other students. The walls are covered with more posters along with championship flags and newspaper clippings. A set of bunk beds is pushed against the far wall, with a single bed and a battered couch against opposite walls. The bathroom screams out for a good scrubbing.
“We take turns cleaning,” Bentsen said. “Actually, we take turns cleaning different areas of the bathroom.”
According to Graffius, men’s dorms have their own special concerns: “The other dorm (Wilson Hall) smelled a lot like men. This one doesn’t smell–yet.”
Dorm life at a small private college is different from that at a large university where students may be housed in huge, multistoried, coed dormitories.
But no matter what the living arrangement, the complaint is the same. “I miss having my own space,” said Christian Life student Derek Ellingsen, 18, of Duluth.
Jannson said roommates have to define their personal areas. “You say, `That’s my space.’ You learn to see your stuff, and not everyone else’s,” Jannson said. “But the hardest thing is there is really no place to be alone.”
John Stevens, 20, of England, is in his second year at Christian Life and has his own room. “The first year I had to share with somebody. It was hard. He’d always wake me up early,” he said.
But Igor Bogun has learned to be grateful for the little things, such as taking an uninterrupted shower.
The 18-year-old student, originally from Ukraine, is in his second semester at Christian Life, and his class schedule finally meshes with his housemates’, which allows Bogun to shower at his leisure.
“Before, I would be in the bathroom for half a minute,” he said, “and someone would kick me out.”
A DIFFERENT COMMUNITY
Students who live in campus housing claim to get more out of college than students who commute to classes.
But the option of living on campus is not available to students enrolled at community colleges or those who attend one of the major Chicago universities’ suburban campuses. Are these students getting less out of their college experience?
“Community college is a totally different experience,” said Jason Bentsen, a student at Judson College, who previously attended Waubonsee Community College in Aurora. “You just hang out with the same people from high school.”
Community colleges serve specific geographic areas, which accounts for the number of high school graduates attending the same school, and the majority of community college students are enrolled on a part-time basis. At Elgin Community College, part-time students make up 75 percent of the total student population, and at Harper College in Palatine, twice as many students attend classes part time as full time.
Students at community college say their interests are more varied. “If we’re going to get together and go out, we hit the clubs downtown,” said Liz Rodriguez, 21, of Palatine, a student at Harper.
Families and jobs take up a lot of students’ time; community college students tend to be older than the traditional four-year college student.
“Who has time to hang out?” asked Nancy Miller, 34, of Mt. Prospect. “I’ve got two kids to take care of, a house to clean and dinner to cook. I have to help my kids with their homework before I even begin mine.”
For students who have the time, student unions and cafeterias are the gathering places of choice. And the community colleges try their best to connect students to the campus. Harper offers more than 40 clubs and organizations for students; Elgin has similar programs. Students can run for elected office, work for the college newspaper, try out for intramural sports or join the chess or gardening clubs.
But whether they get involved in activities or not, most students say they aren’t missing out on the college experience.
“I’m getting what I want out of college,” Miller said. “It’s called an education.”
