Rowan University’s laundry services have been on a decline for the past few years. As a student who has lived all four years on campus and in multiple dorms, I have witnessed and experienced some of these changes.
During my 2024 spring semester, when I lived at 114 Victoria St., I used a laundry app called Caleco, which allowed me to load money onto an app from my phone to then activate the washers and dryers through Bluetooth.
Being a student of the lower class and who lives paycheck to paycheck, it was convenient to be able to load up some money onto an account and not have to worry about catching myself at a bad time where I don’t have the ability to pay for a full cycle, such as a couple of days before payday.
I was ok with this, removing a point of stress of having to do laundry and sacrificing gas money by already having a payment set up on my own laundry account.
That does not mean that Caleco is without criticism. The one big flaw about that was that you could not take out any leftover change that was in your account, unless you wanted to negotiate your refund with an operator.
At the time, I wasn’t allowed to deposit a specific amount of money into the account; it started at $10 and worked its way up to $50 in increments. Those options for account payments were both useless and infuriating. Consider the price of laundry.
Laundry, both washer and dryer, takes at a minimum, $1.50 each. That makes it $3 per cycle minimum. If you put $10 on that card, you leave a dollar sitting on it that you can’t even use for half a cycle.
The only option to avoid such cases would be to increase the payment to $30 dollars in order to make sure that there is no excess money left on the card, because getting it back would require you to go through a customer service process to get your remaining money back.
From the 2024 fall semester through the 2025 spring semester, I moved to Rowan Boulevard. They changed the way laundry would work to being just your debit card. Instead of having to load up a card onto an app to use the laundry machines, you swiped your card directly into the machines.
Unlike with Caleco, I could now get myself caught in a bad spot where I have to waste some gas money during that pre-payday time that is needed to make it to the next payday for the laundry. At least with the app, I was able to add the money directly on payday and cut off the worry of having to use the gas money for laundry. This isn’t an issue for those who don’t have to worry about paycheck-to-paycheck life, so not everyone will understand. But those who are in the same situation as I may relate.
At the end of the day, I can live with such conditions. I can complain, rant, curse, and even write an opinion piece on this. But from the 2025 fall to the 2026 spring semester, the laundry service has hit rock bottom.
One key difference between my last two laundry rooms was that they had two washers and two dryers each. That made four machines split in half for a pod of people to use in the dorms.
Looking at the schematics of Rowan Boulevard, my current pod can house up to 40 students. That would have been two washers and two dryers to share across our pod. That doesn’t sound like the best, but it’s better than having just one washer and one dryer per room. You can already see where the problem is going.
This year, I only have one washer and one dryer in my nearest laundry room, which is a nightmare that makes me wanna douse myself in honey and salmon and go fist fight a grizzly bear.
At least with four machines, if someone is using one and isn’t paying attention to their laundry timer, you have a second pair of machines to use.
Now, if you are about to go do laundry and find out that someone hasn’t taken their laundry out of the dryer, that completely derails your plans as you either have to reach out on the pod’s group chat and try to tell the person about the remaining clothes or take them out yourself.
It can get even worse. I have had someone leave their clothes in the dryer while they went out to a party. That happened while I still had four machines in my laundry room instead of two, but what happened in that group chat that night was certainly not pretty.
I have witnessed Rowan’s laundry services enough to tell you that they aren’t good or convenient; they are mediocre at best. The fact that I already had to share four laundry machines, let alone two, amongst an entire platoon of students, creates a model of nothing but frustration, time wasting, and inefficiency for students who live on schedules and deadlines.
With the growth of the attendance at Rowan rising every single year, using the same laundry service model for the foreseeable future will create nothing but a reason for students to live off campus.
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