NEW YORK

THIS MONTH, thousands of Americans have been traveling to their children’s college or university for “parents’ weekend.” They’ll wander leaf-strewn lawns and quadrangles with their sons and daughters, asking earnest questions about courses and sports and friends. And later, when they retire to the local Hilton or Sheraton or Holiday Inn, they might notice something ironic: It looks a lot like their kids’ dormitory.

That’s because the dorms themselves are changing, to resemble hotels.

The student centers have gotten big makeovers, too, to look like museums or corporate office buildings. At elite private universities and even at some public ones, students have nicer facilities and services than any previous generation could have imagined. And that raises big questions about what we are teaching them, and why.

Consider George Washington University, where incoming students receive engraved chocolates under their pillows during freshman orientation. Or Ball State University in Indiana, which just opened a $36 million residence hall featuring mobile furniture, a digital music lab, and a dining hall that takes online orders for take-out.

Plasma TVs? Got ’em. Refrigerators and microwaves? Check. Fitness center? Of course. Weekly housecleaning service? For an extra fee, it’s yours.

That’s hardly the kind of luxury that Princeton President Woodrow Wilson envisioned a century ago, when he commissioned a new set of residential buildings for the university. Wilson worried that too many students had moved off campus into “eating clubs,” which separated them according to interests, tastes and wealth. Better that they live together in monastery-like brick or stone dormitories, sealed off from the rest of the world.

“A university was conceived as a place where the community life and spirit were supreme,” wrote one Princeton architect in 1909, three years before Wilson was elected to the U.S. presidency. “It was a walled city against materialism and all of its works.”

After World War I, Harvard would erect seven new dormitories south of its famous yard. Featuring elaborate outside details but humble interiors, the dorms created a literal and symbolic divide between students and the surrounding city.

At new women’s colleges, meanwhile, educators feared that off-campus boarding houses would lead innocent young women astray. So they took special care to construct solid but simple dormitories, which would place all students under college supervision — and also on equal economic footing.

“We have a chance to see what the human spirit can do when unhampered either by deprivation or by excess,” wrote the dean of Smith College in 1919, praising a new set of dormitories.

The biggest boom in dorm construction occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, sparked by massive state and federal spending. In 1958, the University of California’s nine campuses could house only 2,900 students; by 1970, just 12 years later, they had residential space for nearly 20,000. Despite some new architectural styles, most of these dormitories reflected the same ascetic spirit as their predecessors.

Built in concrete or cinderblock, dorms weren’t supposed to be “nice.”

They were functional, not fancy.

Fast-forward to the new $22-million dormitory at Tufts University, offering suites with two large singles off a sun-lit living room. Each suite has a dining room with a glass table and a kitchen with a dishwasher. “This is like going from Amerisuites to the Ritz-Carlton,” one Tufts senior told The Boston Globe last month. Get it? The dorm is a hotel, and it just got way nicer.

And that’s very bad news for anyone who cares about the future of the university. By providing really nice things for our kids, we’re teaching them to expect such goodies as their due. And we’re forgetting the older collegiate ideal, which prized the life of the mind over the lure of materialism.

Only a segment of students can afford the new luxuries, of course, which only makes matters worse. More and more colleges now price their dorms at different rates, depending on how many bells and whistles are included. So you see rich kids in the fancier residence halls and poorer students in the older ones, which yields exactly the type of economic divide that Wilson and his generation wanted to avoid.

How did we get here? As government aid has declined, colleges must chase the students with the most dollars. And the best way to do that is by offering really cool stuff. I don’t think any university president likes the idea of loading luxuries onto already privileged 18-year-olds. But competing schools are doing it; so what choice do we have?

During the Cold War, that kind of thinking was called “Mutually Assured Destruction.” We didn’t need nuclear warheads, really, but the other team was building them. Today, at universities, we’ve entered the era of Mutually Assured Consumption. And we’re all impoverished by it.

Jonathan Zimmerman, an occasional contributor, teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century (Harvard University Press).