Nicholas Wapshott is not happy that Arizona State University students are living in lux dorms, presumably because he’s a bit jealous. Maybe he believes college students don’t deserve nice dorms because they’re young. Young as they may be however, many students assume debt or at least pay a portion of the thousands of dollars charged for tuition, room, and board, so why shouldn't they live well? The financial burden may seem minimal, but in proportion to the income of most college students, it's astronomical.

Wapshott writes:

Spare a thought for the students at Arizona State University who will this semester be obliged to shack up in the new $130m (£74.3m) Vista del Sol complex. Not for them a spartan, shared dorm with a communal bathroom down the hall. No, the poor little rich kids of ASU will have to make do with what could pass for a five-star Caribbean beach resort. Rooms open onto a palm-lined pool where light reading can be attempted on the sundeck's colourful lounge cabanas. Between lectures and tanning, undergrads can take in a movie at the in-house multiplex or watch football on giant TVs in the cocktail bar-cum-common room.

…It all makes Princeton's new $136m student residence with traditional Hogwarts-style dorms seem as if it's not really trying. What does it think it is? A hallowed place of learning?

Wapshott seems to believe that learning and a lovely living environment are mutually exclusive. Next we’ll be hearing that learning and pleasant weather cannot coexist, and he’ll be discouraging students from attending Stanford. Or maybe, once the envy had worn away, Wapshott will leave, the “student princes” (his term, obviously) alone.