Going away to college

Once away from the family, for many students living and studying in a metropolis could become a nightmare experience if they could not afford the rent and university taxes or mortgages. With the rise of the new forms of cognitive capitalism, the production of knowledge and the question of education have assumed a dominant role within the city. This new paradigm of production has coincided with a new urban proletariat of students and knowledge workers. Students, as future workers, pushed from the family and persuaded from universities with the promise of becoming future self-entrepreneurs and excellent professionals are faced in reality with the concrete problematics of the housing question and the welfare state crisis.

Image: Thomas Jefferson’s Plan for the University of Virginia (1817-25). This drawing was made by Jefferson accepting the modifications suggested by the architect Benjamin Latrobe to place the pavilions (professors’ villas) at the corner of the parallel wings of the University.