Graphic by Henry Barraclough
The daunting task every college kid hears about before the big move: Laundry. Everyone’s always embellishing horror stories of laundry room brawls, or reminding you about the importance of fabric softener (which you really don’t need, by the way). So I’m sure when you arrived at Tufts, you steeled yourself to face all sorts of underwear thieves and strange machine settings and stormed into the laundry room wielding your Amazon Essential Laundry Bag. And there it was: CSC Laundry Services asking you for $1.50 of your hard-earned JumboCash for washing and then twisting the knife with another $1.50 to use the dryer. Many of you may have been surprised – appalled, even – by this burden on your Kindlevan smoothie funds, so I’m here to soothe your concerns and help explain why laundry at Tufts must be $3.
Despite many area schools like Northeastern, Harvard, and MIT all having free laundry, Tufts remains among the pantheon of schools upholding the timeless tradition of charging their students for taking care of themselves. Assuming every non-CS major underclassman washes their clothes at least once every two weeks, Tufts stands to make approximately $150,000 a semester from laundry – three semester’s worth of tuition! Doesn’t it make more sense now? Why would Tufts bother to include laundry in the already impressive and popular tuition cost when they could nickel-and-dime you every week? If Tufts just included the price of laundry in tuition like the other schools, you wouldn’t be able to experience the joy of watching your account funds slowly fade away into nothing but a 30-minute wash cycle that doesn’t wash your clothes but sure as hell makes your reds bleed into every white you own.
Now let’s make like the Admissions office and ignore the overwhelming cost of being a Tufts student for a moment. Both Boston University and Boston College make their students pay for laundry like a good school should. And like every school across the country has been saying these days, “We should align our student life with BC and our costs with BU.” You should be grateful for this opportunity to jump on the bandwagon. Also, if disambiguating the two schools is confusing, just treat them as the same thing. They love that.
Of course, you don’t have to pay into Big Jumbo’s pocket (more than you already are). There are other options – going back to your home 30 minutes outside of Boston works fine. The beautiful town of Medford, Massachusetts also has several local laundromats nearby – sorry, who am I kidding? You’re a Tufts student, your God-given duty is to make Medford unlivable by increasing the cost-of-living and taking up residential land faster than you can say “gentrification!”
Just remember: somewhere out there, Sunil Kumar will personally go hungry if you don’t cough up a Dunkin’ Iced Coffee worth of JumboCash every week. And if you’re not used to Dunkin’ as a unit of measurement, get with the program.
