Penn State Dorms: Students Can Keep Them Clean
As the first rays of the Sun shine through your window and into your eyes, you wake up
with a start. It’s earlier than you’ve woken up all summer, but you’re fully awake in mere
seconds. You are too excited to sleep in: you’ve been waiting for this day for months. On this
warm Saturday in late August, you’re taking a big step in becoming an adult: you are finally
going off to college. In a few hours, your parents will deposit you and most of your possessions
hundreds of miles from where you grew up, and you’ll have to live life on your own for the first
time. Transportation, food, your new dorm room: you now have to care for it all by yourself.
Of the various changes that young adults experience when they begin higher education,
moving out of your parents’ house and into a dormitory is one of the most significant. When
young people leave home and move onto a college campus, they no longer have their fathers to
tell them what they can and cannot do in their rooms, their siblings to walk into their personal
space unannounced, or their mothers to clean up after them. They now live on their own. They
are free to have their own place to call home. They are free to do whatever they choose in their
new residences, and they now have to take responsibility for their actions in the new home, all
own their own. Unfortunately, when it comes to living on a college or university campus, many
students fail to shoulder this responsibility. I propose that this be changed through the
implementation of a new program for on-campus college residents.
An Environment that Teaches Responsibility?
As can be verified by the vast majority of undergraduate students, college dormitories are
typically not very clean places to live. Common problems associated with living on campus
include trash on floors, personal messes in the bathrooms, and bodily waste being found in
various places around living areas. This can especially be seen at Penn State University. A
survey was taken of over one hundred current students and recent graduates (graduates within the
past five years) of Penn State about their experiences with the cleanliness of Penn State’s
University Park campus. The responses given by the current and former residents of the campus
clearly indicate that the environment of a college campus, particularly its housing facilities, is far
from clean.
Of those surveyed, an overwhelming majority reported finding litter on campus on a
weekly basis, and a majority of respondents also reported seeing trash in dormitory hallways and
bathrooms on a weekly basis. Of the cleanliness issues for which the respondents were asked to
share their experiences, all except for vomit in sinks and on floors were experienced at least once
every week by more than one third of students and recent graduates. In a living environment
filled with adults (the vast majority of American college students are eighteen or older), is it
reasonable to expect residents to clean up the mess that they make? Or is it more reasonable to
expect older adults to maintain an acceptable level of cleanliness in dormitories?
The Performance of the University Custodial Staff
If the residents of a Penn State’s University Park campus either fail to keep their living
areas mess free, or simply choose to make a mess of them, the responsibility to remedy this
problem falls to Custodial Services, a division of the Office of Physical Plant (OPP). The job of
the OPP is to maintain the grounds and facilities of the Pennsylvania State University.
Maintaining an attractive, functional, healthy, and safe learning environment for students is the
OPP’s task in keeping the university operating as intended.
On the Custodial Services page of the OPP website, there is a large graphic that contains
the phrase “Achieving Custodial Excellence”. Custodial Services strives to maintain a high
standard of cleanliness and functionality of buildings and outdoor areas at Penn State. On their
web page, there is a link to the Custodial Services Quality Service Action Plan. This plan
describes how Custodial Services maintains efficiency, effectiveness, and ethics in the
maintenance of university facilities. In the action plan one can find the following:
“Our Customer’s Expectations
In our performance: clean buildings, cost-effective and quality service, efficient
and consistent performance, competen[ce] and knowledge in our field…
Service Attitude…
5. Be accountable and responsible for your work. Perform work that meets
expected standards of performance and produce quality work that you would put
your name on.”
When someone states that they will produce work that they would put their name on, the
work will almost certainly be performed at a high level of quality. The staff members that work
in Custodial Services take personal responsibility for the tasks that they perform, and these tasks
are consistently performed at a high level of quality. In the case of Custodial Services,
consistently means every day: at some time, whether during the first, second, or third shift, every
building at the University Park campus is cleaned. When the level at which the university
custodial staff performs is considered, and when the fact that all buildings on campus are cleaned
daily is taken into account, it becomes clear that the residents of the dormitories, not the
custodians, are responsible for the recurring poor cleanliness around the University Park campus.
A Plan to Promote Resident Responsibility
The living facilities at Penn State’s University Park campus are meticulously maintained
by custodial staff employed by the university, yet cleanliness problems repeatedly emerge. The
residents do not take responsibility for the actions that they take: the actions that lead to unclean
and unhealthy conditions on campus. Therefore, the solution to the problem of negative on-
campus conditions lies with the residents. The students who attend the nation’s colleges and
universities are in the midst of a transitional period in their lives. Dr. Jeffrey Jansen Arnett, a
psychologist who specializes in young adults, has proposed that college-aged adults are in their
own stage of psychological development between adolescence and adulthood, which he has
coined “emerging adulthood.” This age group, which consists of adults ranging from their late
teens to late twenties, is characterized by identity exploration, self-focus, optimism, a feeling of
being in-between (the dependence of childhood and the total independence of adulthood), and
instability. The last of these qualities is part of what makes the late teens and early twenties an
ideal time for higher education: young adults are transitioning into mental, social, and financial
adulthood, making them receptive to new ideas and more likely to change how they live before
they truly enter the world as independents. Emerging adults are at the final stage of life where
they can truly be influenced, and this should be taken advantage of to plant the value of personal
responsibility in the next generation of adults.
This should be done by establishing a resident-custodian cooperative program. A
resident-custodian cooperative program (RCCP) would be a program in which on-campus
residents will play a role in assisting the Custodial Services staff at the University Park campus,
and eventually at all Penn State campuses that offer on-campus housing. The goal of the RCCP
would be to provide an experience-oriented way to give residents an appreciation for the work
done by custodial staff, as well as a first-hand look at how personal responsibility for one’s
actions can benefit all members of a community. As students work alongside of custodians and
experience what is involved in keeping the university’s facilities safe and healthy, they will see
how their actions impact those around them and how the small efforts of many individuals can
greatly reduce the difficulties experienced by a few.
The RCCP would be an expansion to the responsibilities of students living in residence
halls, one that would be written into the housing contract. The RCCP will require students to
participate in a total of three service projects during each academic year that they spend on
campus: one to be completed at any point during both the fall and spring semesters, and one to
be completed during the warmer portions of either the fall or spring semester. These service
projects will involve working with Custodial Services staff members to both clean the inside of
residence halls as well as the grounds of the University Park campus. Two of the service projects
will be inside of residence halls, and the final project (the one to be completed during the warmer
portions of either semester) will be on the grounds of the campus.
The indoor service projects will each be two-hour long shifts during which residents will
work with custodians to clean their floor’s restroom or restrooms, and possibly an additional
hallway area or bathroom, depending on the time left in the student’s shift. During these two
shifts, students will assist custodians in a variety of ways, according to what the custodian is
doing during the duration of the service project. Students will empty trash cans and recyclable
bins, sweep hallways, vacuum rugs, wash bathroom floors and other surfaces, and wash and
disinfect bathroom fixtures. The indoor service projects will show residents just how much work
goes into keeping the dormitories clean and lead to both an appreciation of the efforts of the
Custodial Services staff and a desire to keep the residence areas clean.
The other type of service project, the outdoor service project, will focus on maintaining a
clean and attractive environment around the buildings and walkways on campus. For the second
type of service project, students will work with the litter crews that can be seen around campus in
the mornings. Students will spend two hours, as was the case with the indoor service projects,
patrolling campus with a custodial staff member or members and picking up any and all trash
that they find on sidewalks and streets, along walkways, in grassy areas, and in plant beds. This
type of service project will, as with the first type of project, give students an appreciation of the
work that goes into keeping the University Park campus beautiful and encourage them to strive
to keep the campus beautiful with their own actions regarding littering.
The two indoor service projects will be administered once per semester, one at some
point during the fall semester, and the other during the first half of the spring semester. These
projects will be able to be done at any point during the fall and spring semesters, so long as one
two-hour shift is covered during each. If a student is unable to complete their required shift
during the fall semester, then they may make it up during the spring semester. Similarly, if a
resident completes two indoor projects during the fall semester, he or she will not have to
complete one in the spring. The outdoor project will be administered either during the first half
the fall semester or the latter half of the spring semester, in order to give the greatest possibility
for favorable weather when this project is carried out. Residents will be able to schedule their
RCCP shifts as far as two months in advance and as close as one week to the day they wish to
complete their project. This will allow for flexibility for on-campus students to plan service
projects around their changing schedules while also giving housing staff advanced notice as to
when students will be working. A list of available time slots will be viewable on the Penn State
eLiving website so that students can see what time slots are available and plan accordingly.
Despite the flexibility of the scheduling of the RCCP service project, some students will
not wish to take time out of their schedules to complete a service project, and others will simply
not be motivated to complete a project. To remedy this, an addition will be made to housing
contracts. This addition will state that failure to complete the three required RCCP projects
during the current academic year will result in ineligibility for an on-campus housing contract for
the following academic year. This incentive will not be compelling for students who plan to
move off campus after the current academic year, so for each service project that is not
completed, $100.00 per failed project will be added to the student’s room and board bill at the
end the academic year, with a maximum of $300.00 being added to a student’s bill each
academic year. This is not an overly expensive penalty, as the rate for a standard double room for
one academic year is $5,460, making the maximum penalty equate to less than six percent of the
yearly cost for a room on campus. This money can be used towards funds for future
improvement of residence facilities at Penn State.
The RCCP will not require the addition of any staff positions at the university to
administer. Students will be able to schedule their shifts online, eliminating the need for a
coordinator between custodial staff and residents. Automated confirmation emails will be sent to
both Custodial Services and a resident when he or she schedules a shift. Students will receive
credit for their service by picking up a form from their commons desk and having a custodian fill
out the necessary parts of the form when the shift has been completed. The student will then be
responsible for returning the completed form to the commons desk, where an on-duty resident
assistant (RA) will record the student’s completion of the shift on eLiving. Students with
concerns can contact RA’s or a residence life coordinator, if an RA is unable to resolve the issue.
With this system, the adoption of the RCCP will cause no cost increase for the university, and
can still have a positive impact on the residence halls.
Conclusion
While somewhat disgusting dormitories are an accepted part of life at many colleges, it is
possible for Penn State to change that. The adoption of the RCCP will promote personal
responsibility for the cleanliness of residence halls while also increasing student appreciation for
Custodial Services staff members, who consistently strive to maintain a healthy environment on
campus. The responsibility that residents will learn from this program will stick with them for
the rest of their lives, and help shape them into productive members of society. First and
foremost, the installation of a resident-custodian cooperative program will lead to cleaner and
thus healthier and safer facilities on campus, and an overall improved campus environment, for
University Park students, faculty, and visitors alike.
Sources
"Custodial Services." opp.psu.edu. 27 Sep 2013. Web. 2 Apr 2014.
<http://www.opp.psu.edu/about-opp/divisions/bg/as/custodial>.
"Fall 2014/ Spring 2015 Rates." hfs.psu.edu. 7 Mar 2014. Web. 2 Apr 2014.
<http://www.hfs.psu.edu/HFS/Rates/fall14-spring15.cfm>.
"Housing Services." hfs.psu.edu. 27 Oct 2013. Web. 2 Apr 2014.
<http://www.hfs.psu.edu/housing/housing/housing-services.cfm>.
Munsey, C. American Psychological Association, 2006. Web.
<http://www.apa.org/monitor/jun06/emerging.aspx>.
"Quality Service Action Plan." opp.psu.edu. 28 Apr 2010. Web. 2 Apr 2014.
<http://www.opp.psu.edu/about-opp/qs/custodialsvcs>.
Sechrist, Jeremy. "Are these dorms really clean?." surveymonkey.com. 28 Mar 2014. Web.
<https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5PCS8PC>.