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new college dorms at Loft-Right have full kitchens, with refrigerator, stove, and microwave. The lobby has a lounge with a fireplace and a pool table. On the first floor there is a Starbucks, nail spa, tanning center, bank, and sandwich cafe. The Loft-Right college dorms also offer personalized key card access, a full-time doorman, 911 emergency phones in each unit, video cameras in public areas, limited indoor heated parking, along with traditional parking, There are also no curfews or restrictive visitation rules in this college dorm. The prices quoted on their web site ran from $12,750 per student (per academic term), to $26,150 per student (per academic term), depending on the number of people sharing a suite.

Robert Bronstein, developer and student housing consultant, at DePaul University in Chicago, now has another new progressive concept in mind, for college dorms. He wants to create a "Club Med" for students attending Illinois State University. The new college dorms will have hot tubs, outdoor volleyball courts, and plasma TVs in each apartment. He states definitively that there will be no more college dorm designs with communal bathrooms. (Many are now providing full-sized beds as well.)

Ball State University in Ohio has new college dorms that cost $36 million, and include amenities such as a digital music lab, mobile furniture, and a dining room that offers online take out service. Texas A&M has resort type townhouse college dorms with a pool and basketball courts. The renovated, luxurious, new college dorms of the University of South Florida, offer 42 inch high-definition flat screen televisions in each apartment.

Many campuses offer wireless Internet connections, as well as enormous recreation centers, to accompany the new college dorms. Southern Methodist University has an aerobic workout room that features 7 huge flat-screen TVs, 6 racquetball courts, a lap pool, a 40-foot rock climbing wall, an indoor soccer field, a huge weight room, treadmills, spinners, elliptical trainers with their own TV monitors, gravity trainers, 2 volleyball courts, an indoor track, rental of canoes and tents, and a coffee shop, according to James M. O'Neill of The Dallas Morning News. (Just a few perks.) Oh, I forgot-the 7 foot outdoor waterfall and wading pool, for college dorm students who want to sunbathe and hang out, seems to have slipped my mind.

And talk about the competition between new college dorms-it's unbelievable. O'Neill writes that Baylor University

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