Students shell out cash for cleaning

Students at Penn who find themselves amid grime, dust and hair balls have a new option for cleaning their rooms.

DormAid is a cleaning service that brings a team of two trained professionals, cleaning supplies included, to clean your room. From removing the questionable leftovers that have been sitting in the fridge for months to making your bed and dusting your room, an hour of service will cost, on average, $36.96.

Originally started at Harvard, DormAid has recently expanded to Penn, with the help of a few students who saw a business idea in the disarray of their dorm rooms.

When Wharton sophomore Sam Kraus moved out of his room last year, his father came to pick him up.

"He was shocked at the state my room was in," Kraus said. Now Kraus works for the Penn branch of DormAid, along with College sophomore Josh Klosk.

The students started pursuing the idea to expand DormAid to Penn last spring, and they received permission from the University around April.

The people hired to do the cleaning will follow the standard guest policies, so students will sign the cleaners into the college house and be responsible for their actions. For this reason, security is a major concern, and Klosk has been interviewing people for the job and doing background checks on the candidates.

"It's been a lot of work, but we're excited that the initial process has finished and the business is now running," Klosk said. It will be just a matter of weeks before the actual cleaning will begin.

"It took Harvard months [to begin operation], but Penn has a more entrepreneurial vision," Klosk said of the process for receiving permission to allow the cleaning professionals to enter the dorms.

Harvard junior Michael Kopko, who is a friend of Klosk, started DormAid with his brother, a sophomore at Princeton, after Michael decided to hire a professional cleaning service for his dorm at Harvard. But because of the differences in university regulations, DormAid first began at Boston University.

DormAid now operates at Harvard, Babson, Dickinson, George Washington, NYU, Princeton and Rutgers.

A large source of DormAid patronage at schools around the country has been parents concerned with the state of students' dorms.

That was certainly the case for Wharton freshman Jackie Brand. Her mother and her roommate's mother decided to get the service "because there was a lot of dust in the room, and it becomes moist."

Neither Klosk, Kraus nor Kopko would specify how many Penn students are currently signed up for DormAid.

But with several hundred customers, each spending an average of $500 per semester, at seven different colleges and universities, sales for the student-run company are in the hundreds of thousands, though Kopko would not specify the exact amount. He expects DormAid to expand to between 30 and 50 colleges by the end of next summer.

All did not start smoothly for these entrepreneurial brothers, however. Harvard's newspaper, the Crimson, published an editorial asking students to boycott the service because, the Crimson staff said, it would create a divide between students who could afford it and those who could not.

"Harvard is an anomaly," said Kopko about the regulatory barriers that he encountered in starting DormAid.

"It is strange that in America you have to gain the right to open a business that will provide a service to people," Kopko said.

Klosk said the issues that arose at Harvard have not been a concern at Penn. "There are millions of ways in which class clashes arise every day, and students realize that having someone clean your room will not be one of them," Klosk said.

College sophomore Daniel Spelman said he would not be concerned that hiring a cleaning service would create a division from dorm to dorm, but rather that it may "create conflicts with roommates" living in the same room.

"If one person doesn't want to clean and his part of the cleaning is being done by someone he hired, will that detract from the camaraderie?" Spelman asked.

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