Those are some pricey crayons.
New York University, where parents now spend $91,000 on their kids’ tuition, room and board, has a new student perk: a screen-free daycare-like campus corner filled with coloring books, board games, stuffed animals and clay.
“The Nest” on the second floor of the university’s Kimmel Center has tables covered with arts and crafts; a giant Connect Four, Etch-a-Sketches, polaroid pictures, colorful art hung on the walls and a record player.
A giant “PLAY” sign sits on top of a game shelf with a reminder to return the games they borrow.
The childlike haven opened on Feb. 24 at the Village campus — along with NYU outposts in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai.
Phones are locked away in charging cubbies while students revisit their preschool years — molding sculptures or completing puzzles.
While the university has pitched The Nest as a wellness hub, critics chuckled at the nanny state emerging where people who should be getting ready for adulthood.
“The infantilization of students continues — with the active cooperation of the students themselves, it should be noted,” Heather MacDonald, author and fellow at the Manhattan Institute, told The Post.
“The ever-expanding college bureaucracy became superfluous decades ago, but providing toy-filled interaction zones for undergraduates is particularly ludicrous. Any college administrator who has worked on that idea should be fired since he clearly has nothing actually important to do.”
The Nest is just one piece of the university’s broader “NYU IRL [In Real Life],” initiative aimed at getting students offline.
. J.C. Rice for NY Post
The campaign is the largest device-free effort taken on by any major university, NYU said in a news release.
Professor Jonathan Haidt, who teaches at NYU’s Stern School of Business, inspired the undertaking with his book “The Anxious Generation,” which discusses how the rise of smartphones sparked a mental health crisis among Gen Z.
“If colleges want to decouple students from their phones — a not unworthy goal — they should assign enough rigorous homework, without phony disability exemptions, to take up students’ attention,” Mac Donald said.
“As for getting students to talk more to each other, students can decide their own level of interaction. They should not be taught to expect their coddling bureaucrats to provide them with prompts.”
But students cheered The Nest for offering a much-needed change of pace from their screen-centered lives.
“I love that the school is encouraging digital-free zones, especially because everything is so focused on your laptops and your phones,” Alexandra Robinson Bellin, 18, of Chicago, told The Post from a couch adorned with plush toys.
The freshman drama major fondly recalled an Uno tournament she and her friends had attended days prior — one of the many events urging students to live in the real world instead of being swallowed by their screens.
“It’s a lot of games and a lot of crafts. These are things you don’t usually do at university,” sophomore business major Avani Advani, 19, a student-worker at the lounge from India, acknowledged.
“Without this place, I don’t feel like I would be playing games that I used to play in my childhood … It’s such a nice way to connect with things that you used to do so you feel that sense of belonging.”
With puzzles, Play Dough and board games everywhere — students have had no trouble recreating their childhood wonder.
“It’s a nice place to come to unwind, eat, and maybe play a game of Uno after class,” Zihao Huang, 18, a freshman education major from Brooklyn said. “It’s good to take a break from the devices that we are connected to every single minute of every single day.”