Kids/Adults are living with their parents longer and longer these days for a number of reasons, not the least of which is living expenses.
I think it must be a regional thing for colleges to require students to live in residence. And I would think it would be on the decline rather than the upswing.
Okie-dokie. 
Never lived on campus. Wasn’t even a real option at my undergrad school. I would have gone nuts if forced to live in university housing.
I hate the trend of forcing people to live in dorms. Okay, you liked it and some people may be immature, but that doesn’t mean you can force it onto everybody. In return, I won’t try to force you to live off campus. Deal?
At some small colleges in small towns there are not really a lot of other places to live except the dorms.
Duke has an interesting situation with frats - they don’t have houses like most places, the frat members just live in the dorms.
From what I was told the reason a lot of dorms around here were built in the 60s was federal money was provided to build those dorms so states didn’t have to use their own money. Once that money dried up the dorm building pretty much stopped.
Roughly the same story here when I did my undergrad, though the city was Toronto and the school was the University of Toronto. There was no need to live on campus for me; I was already living just a few subway stops away and saw no reason to live on campus. The U of T had student housing for those who needed it, but no “must live on campus” requirement–in fact, I’m unaware of any Canadian universities that have such a requirement.
When I went to law school, I did live in student housing; although it was hardly a dorm as portrayed on TV and in movies. I had a small, one-person, self-contained apartment, with kitchen and bathroom. No meal plans; I did my own grocery shopping and cooking. It may have been in student housing, but it was very much like any other bachelor apartment in non-student housing.
I graduated from NCSU in 1988 w/o ever living on campus. I “transferred” in from the local community college in my sophomore year, however. BTW… i never took an SAT test either.
A lot of the other items you mention would be linked to that, though. Someone who’s got a full-time job and a mortgage outside the university is more likely to be a part-time student than someone who’s going to college straight out of high school and paying for it via his parents or student loans.
I stayed at home because campus (University of Alberta, if anyone cares) was an express bus ride away.
Why would schools force freshmen to live on campus?
I went to a community college my first 2 years of college, and then transferred and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh. I also stayed at home mostly because I couldn’t afford to live on campus. Everything pertaining to college came out of my pocket. (Almost had the chance to live on campus when Financial Aid screwed up and thought I was an out of state student = qualified for more money, but then I brought it to their attention I was from PA… no new on campus housing for me junior year 
)
I’d make the 30 minute commute by car into the city way before my earliest class would start, as finding a parking spot was easier at 730am than at 830a. I did have a steady boyfriend who went to another school near Pitt, and I’d crash with him if I needed a place to stay. In retrospect, I kind of wish I did live on campus. I was a really quiet, shy and reserved person back in college and part of me feels like I missed out on some things (my hubby is still close with his roomates from college).
Not living on campus gave me the opportunity to maintain a part time job as well that turned into a full time position for a few summers. I did graduate with high honors, some money in the bank too. I’ve just never had the opportunity to really ‘be on my own.’
Because the students are just seventeen or eighteen years old, living far from their parents and on their own for the first time. Even then, some freshmen get into trouble. (For example, one of the guys in my freshmen dorm got so drunk that he had to be taken by ambulance to detox, and this was before classes even started.)
Yes. Lots of the prestigious, private, national, universities require freshman to live on campus as a form of assimilation. I am introverted and don’t especially like to live with other people but I do appreciate that Tulane forced me to do that. It was a coed dorm with something to do 24/7 with males or females and I was always in touch with everything that was going on because I was surrounded by other people in the same boat. We also had support resources should anything go badly wrong and sometimes they did. My freshman year in a tiny room with a marginal roommate was still was one of the happiest times in my life and I don’t think I would have done nearly as well without it. This was in New Orleans though and we didn’t have many strict rules at all like they did in some places.
What if they’re 19? Or 27? Is the rule just that all first-year students who just left high school must live on campus, or all students bar none? (I assume actually that this is a rule that’s more common at small, private schools in isolated areas, which is not a model I’m very used to in Canada. Maybe these schools have a very low percentage of returning students?)
I didn’t live on campus. A large majority of students at my high school went to one of the three universities or umpteen community colleges in our city, so I never questioned that I would do the same. It saved a ton of money - combined with the small scholarships I received each year and the relatively low tuition rates, I could pay all my expenses through a minimum wage summer job and a couple hours of work throughout the year. It wasn’t the most social time of my life, which I do regret, but I hate the argument that students who live at home don’t learn “valuable life lessons” that students who live on campus do. Because getting up at 6 to avoid rush hour on the bus and subway is not at all like “real life”, whereas eating pizza at 3 a.m. with a crowd of people your own age, watched over by residence assistants, and getting up 5 minutes before class to pull on pajama pants and flip flops is exactly like the workforce.
(That sounds very dismissive of residence life, and I don’t mean it that way. I’m sure that a lot of students don’t live that way anyway. If I could do it again I would have left home and incurred some debt. But I do feel like commuting was a “valuable life lesson,” albeit a different one.)
I know plenty of people from Chicago who lived at home during college, ISTM that it’s more the rule than the exception around here for kids from working class families. There are plenty of good 4-year schools in Chicago that are commuter-friendly, and if your finances are limited then the alternate is to go to one of the IL state schools in the cornfields downstate.
I would assume it works the same in most major cities, there are a few commuter schools that serve kids from the area and they have no on-campus requirement. The oddball case I know of is ASU, which AIUI has recently required that freshmen live on campus. That seems bizarre to me, I would assume a good number of their students come from Phoenix-metro, and AFAIK there is not an alternate comprehensive undergrad college in Phoenix, save a few for-profit schools. I don’t know much about the details, though, I’m not familiar with the school other than going to putter around when visiting family in PHX.
As I remember, older freshmen were not required to live in a dorm, nor was it a requirement if you’re close enough that you can continue to live in your parents’ house. But I think you’ll miss out on part of the college experience if you commute while the majority of the students are living on campus. At the same time, it’s not cheap. I just checked, and the dorms at my school cost about $6500 for the academic year (in Troy, NY, mind you), and with the meal plan, the cost approaches $10,000. But many of the dorms are very nice, all utilities are included and university staff did all the maintenance and cleaning.
My father is a retired professor and his school had a mixture of residential and commuter students (although they’re now building more dorms). They actually had separate student governments for the two groups.
I lived at home and considered that infinitely more desirable than living on campus. All my friends commuted. We had jobs to help pay for school and having a home to live in was a luxury as well as a method of saving money
I could not see the advantage of paying for the privilege of being crammed into a pigsty full of loud, obnoxious children. I hated to even go into the Student Union because it looked like someone was hired to scatter trash on every square foot of the place.
I loved home cooked meals as well has having a quiet place to study. The laundry room was next to the bathroom which was next to my bedroom which was next to the kitchen. I lived in a palace compared to a dorm.
I never lived on campus.
This may explain why my alma mater has imposed rules that if you don’t get your degree within a specified time, they kick you out.
“Missing out on the college experience.” is complete and total hooey. Given the huge amount of drunkeness that occurs now at colleges, there’s a lot to be said for actually avoiding that. You’re experiencing something all the time. Let people choose what they want to experience.
Some 18 year olds can handle living on their own, some can’t. That’s not the job of a university to decide.
I’ve known kids who were kicked out of their homes by their parents upon turning 18 or graduating high school. As in that very week. They have enough problems working and going to school without a college dictating their lives. These kids are smart enough and hard working enough to just squeeze by sharing a house with friends living close to where they work so they don’t need a car. I know one kid who dropped out of a nice college because of the dorm rule. It’s just plain stupid.
I know one state school here forced the dorm rule for frosh rule thru because they had surplus housing and needed to fill it. Nice.
Again, I won’t force you to live off campus if you won’t force me to live on campus. What can be fairer?
I never lived on campus. The school I got my degree from didn’t even have on-campus housing. Student housing was at an apartment complex on the other side of a freeway, the campus itself was a former office building.
Furthermore, I got married before attending, and they didn’t offer married housing.
Of course it is and to say otherwise is ludicrous especially for the more prestigious schools. The job of universities and colleges is to provide a comprehensive educational package that includes unique experiences that can never be replicated at any other time in life as well as being exposed to many different types of people. If someone doesn’t like it, they are free to choose another school. I personally don’t think that anyone that has never been exposed to dorm or frat house life has any background to comment on it at all because it is a once in a lifetime experience whether it winds up being good or bad.
That’s a shame. We had Everclear Fridays, and the only condition was that the stereo stay low until classes were over.