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
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.
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.
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?
>Can you imagine if even every other room had an appliance pulling 1000W whenever the hell a student felt like warming up some soup?
Can you imagine if even every other room had an appliance pulling 1000W whenever the hell a student felt like blowdrying their hair after their shower?
The main problem with the provided dorm microwaves when I was in school was burned popcorn sending the entire dorm outside at 4am until the campus security could come and turn off the alarm.