For Princeton students, laundry is more than just a chore. It’s a daunting weekly or bi-weekly puzzle.
Clothes washing — and drying, folding, and putting away — are crammed into ever-busy schedules. That’s not to mention the added challenge of finding a free machine.
In the past two years, there have been 145 posts about laundry on Fizz, a social media app for Princeton students, including many complaints about the limited laundry facilities. Examples include “Pls get your laundry when its done” and “i have no shame in throwing your laundry out bc why aren’t you setting a timer?” Each residential college and upperclass dorm offers varying numbers of washers and dryers.
We broke down the availability of laundry machines per college, giving insights into the washer and dryer situation and discussing alternative services available to students.
Princeton’s residential colleges provides free access to washers and dryers, but some are better equipped than others. To understand the availability and accessibility of laundry at Princeton, we analyzed machine counts for the underclassmen population to calculate washer-to-student ratios. During our analysis, we found discrepancies between the washer and dryer counts on online floor plans versus the actual number of machines. To ensure accuracy, we manually collected data by visiting each laundry room and counting the machines. Data of the number of students living in each residential college was obtained from the residential college websites, which provide estimates.
Butler College offers the highest washer-to-student ratio at around 1:20. Whitman College offers the most dryers of any college at 40. The laundry setups of Butler and Whitman stand out from the other colleges — Whitman, in particular, has ten smaller laundry rooms with around two washing machines and four dryers each.
“It’s convenient if not many people are using it, and then you can wash it very quickly, but [it can also be] really inconvenient,” Emily Zhang ’27, a resident of Whitman College, told The Daily Princetonian. “For example, sometimes I’ll have my laundry, like, be done washing, but then there’s no dryers available for the next hour, so I have to, like, bring it down to the basement, where there’s more dryers.”
Other residential colleges offer fewer but larger laundry facilities, with an average of 2.8 laundry rooms per residential college across Forbes, Mathey, Rockefeller, New College West, and Yeh College.
While Butler and Whitman students enjoy better access, residents of other colleges may need to strategize their laundry schedules. Rockefeller College students face tighter competition, with a washer-to-student ratio hovering around 1:50, the lowest among all colleges. New College West and Yeh both feature two large laundry rooms with around 20 washers and 20 dryers each with a washer-to-student ratio of around 1:26.
The washer to student ratio in upperclassmen housing is much lower than that of the residential colleges. There are thirteen laundry rooms across the eighteen upperclassmen dorms, sending students in dorms without laundry facilities spinning. Students in Cuyler Hall, for example, have no option but to go outside to either 1903 or Brown Hall to do their laundry.
Julia Shin ’26 began living in Cuyler Hall this year. According to Shin, “it’s not terrible, because I’m on the first floor of Cuyler, and then the Brown laundry room is on the first floor of Brown, but because it’s three outdoor staircases, it’s a bit of lugging.” She elaborated that “I’ve never done my laundry when it’s raining outside.”
Of the upperclassmen dorms, Scully Hall had the most laundry machines with a total of 10 washers and 16 dryers. Unlike the underclassmen laundry rooms, most of the laundry rooms in upperclassmen housing have red bins for neglected laundry, and it’s common to see laundry lying on floors and on top of the machines.
“[Laundry is] convenient if not many people are using it and then you can wash it very quickly,” Zhang said. “But it’s really inconvenient like for example sometimes I’ll have my laundry, like, be done washing, but then there’s no dryers available for the next hour.”
This semester, around 150 students opted to enroll in the Princeton Student Agencies’ laundry services, which wash and fold laundry for their student customers.
Hannah Choi is a contributing Data writer for the ‘Prince.’
Please send corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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