[voidlogic]

At my college all the dorms had a kitchen for residents to use in the basement... is this not normal?

[jonfw]

We had a kitchen and hundreds of people. Dorms are not designed for students to regularly cook, and even if they were, a shared kitchen seems even less sanitary than a meal hall

[thaumasiotes]

It's not uncommon, but it's also calibrated to the negligible number of residents who want to use the kitchen. If everyone in the dorms suddenly had to eat out of that kitchen, there'd be a several-day waiting list to use it.

Which means it's not a viable fallback.

[protomyth]

US colleges earn money off the meal plan and tend to be liability shy so having a full kitchen is a non-starter. Heck, it was against the rules to have a microwave in dorms (even room not in actual dorms) where I went to college. It was a pain in the butt.

[secstate]

Pretty sure the ban on microwaves was an electrical fire risk, not them being predatory about students eating at the dining hall. Can you imagine if even every other room had an appliance pulling 1000W whenever the hell a student felt like warming up some soup?

[kyeb]

We have 1 kitchen in the basement, but that's shared among 500 people

[kerakaali]

Depends on the dorm, but in some older dormitories there might be maybe one full size kitchen for student use allotted to the entire building.