This looks so insane to me, I wonder how much building a normal apartment would cost in that area. I'm building a 7000sqft high-standard house in South America for around 200K USD.

$29 per sq ft is amazing! Have you documented your project? Interested to learn more.

A new small apartment in San Francisco cannot be built for less than $800k these days, so coming in a $333k per resident is not too surprising to me in a similar high-cost city with a building with a ton of amenities.

An apartment for $800K is understandable. A small bedroom @ $333K is not.

If they already own the building, it is only construction costs whereas buying an apartment is possibly extortionate land or property prices from the current owner, which is purely demand-driven.

well, it's not just a small bedroom @ 333k, it's the small bedroom plus all the shared spaces.

Looking at the blueprint, it seems like 7 of the 9 floors will be solely suites. I assume one floor will be dining hall which I wouldn't count as an amenity, which means only 1 of the 9 floors actually has amenities beside the small common space each suite has.

It does sound like a lot of money but that is also a huge dorm. I couldn't find numbers on a more recent dorm project but MIT's Simmons Hall was completed in 2002. (Which also has sort of a weird window thing going on.) It "only" cost $78 million--so presumably something in excess of $100 million today. But that's for a dorm only housing 350 or so students vs. 4500. But, still you're looking at about 2x the cost per student housed.

But the thing is Simmons Hall is practically a work of art. If you asked students if they wanted to live there or in this place pretty sure every single one would say Simmons.

Like Stata, it's grown on me a bit looking from the outside. It's certainly not boring. Never been inside though so no idea how well it works as a dorm.

In addition to the window thing, the sheer scale of 4,500 students gives me pause. It's something like 10x the number of students of any dorm I've ever experienced.

Sadly, that's not over the top when it comes to institutional building. Particularly in Californian costs.