And having friends has got to be somewhat positively correlated with school success. It would be real way for a an office campus introvert to lose focus as to why they’re there. You’re not there to reach level 100 in a video game or to troll political candidates on Twitter.
My first few months on campus were weird. I spent all high school inside my band geek bubble and now I’m on my own. But it definitely helped sitting with people in the dining hall and hanging in the common area. My roommate and I did a lot together the first few months, kinda fell off do to him dating but we still had a lot of late night BS sessions and the occasional day drinking.
Probably the best solution for an introvert is the suite layout where they have their own room but share common areas. Hopefully someone won’t be so introverted that they turn down every invite to hang out.
I stayed at home and commuted. Got me through school without taking on any debt.
It helped that my mother was working a job that had her on the road for weeks at a time, so I had the whole place ostensibly to myself.
I think being a commuting student would be the worst of all possible worlds. No need to even let go of your high school friends or explore anything new.
The problem with living in the dorms is that you’re dealing with the same institution all day and all night, and there’s the risk of spillover. If you get financially or legally or in any other sense crossways with them in one context, they may become uncooperative or punitive or otherwise adversarial in the other context, and you’ve got no sanctuary to retreat into.
Living in a shared apartment with roommates is far more civilized and a lot more civilizing and I recommend it.
Huh? Do you mean if you fail out of school, you get kicked out of the dorms? I guess that’s true, but I don’t think any dorm does one year leases like an apartment does. So, a student that would have no place to go at all and is in risk of academic dismissal shouldn’t live in a dorm, but that’s got to be a rare few.
Right. Barring serious criminal activity, if they’re going to throw you out, it’ll be at the end of a semester, and you won’t be on the hook for the next one. You’re not going to be left in the lurch particularly badly- there’s always plenty of semester-edge churn in college town housing anyway- if you had to stay there, you could find an apartment easily enough.
I thoroughly enjoyed living on campus; at my school at least, there was a large community of students who did, so there was a definite feel of being in the thick of things as far as the school and its extracurriculars was concerned. Kind of a low buzz of something always happening/going on. The dining hall and the TV/common room were the epicenters of things- hanging out in either one was likely to tap you into whatever was going on that day/week.
Living off campus was more extreme. When you were at your apartment, school was miles away (sometimes literally), and you only had your roommate to deal with. At the same time, you had to cook, you had to clean, you had to shop, etc… And you had to scare up your own stuff to do- you weren’t going to run into someone in the dining hall who’d tell you about something going on that night. You wouldn’t run into a friend in the TV room who would clue you into a party that weekend, etc… But at the same time, you could drink all you wanted/party all you wanted/shack up with your SO all you wanted without anyone saying a thing about it, other than perhaps your roommate, unlike most dorm rooms.
In my experience, the people most itching to move off campus fell into one of four main camps. One was the people with serious SOs, who wanted to spend nights with each other / have a private room. The second was the crowd who wanted to drink/smoke weed(or whatever) without having to deal with dorm rules. The third were the people who thought dorms were too noisy and didn’t live the communal aspect. The fourth were the people who didn’t fall into any of the above groups, but who chafed at the *idea *of being told what they could or couldn’t do, or had some specific reason that they wanted to live off campus- sometimes they hunted and wanted to keep their guns with them, for example.
Let’s say the university says you are on the hook for damages to the kitchen area and must pay at end of semester. You didn’t damage the kitchen, you’re disputing it. You apply to grad school and they need an official transcript. The Registrar’s office won’t release it because you’ve got unpaid bills – meaning the alleged kitchen damage fee.
Damage the kitchen in your rental apartment (or get accused of it when you didn’t) and there may be repercussions but they won’t manifest inside your university life, just on the home front.
I could give more examples but I shouldn’t have to. Institutions are institutions. It’s not a good thing to have nearly all of one’s life enmeshed in a single one, because if things go bad there can be repercussions everywhere you turn around.
Or the people like me that were just young and dumb. Moved off campus with two coworkers at the restaurant I worked at. Thought it would be a great idea and they (2 females) loved the idea of having a guy around. But, I lost focus of what was important. Dumbest mistake I could have made.
I shared a dorm with my sister (you with the face). We crunched the numbers and realized that we could get a studio apartment for the same price as a dorm room. And we’d have own kitchen, bathroom, satellite TV, etc and a lot more space. Plus, we wouldn’t have to pay for parking. Nor deal with the headache of moving at the end of the school year. The apartment was a mile from campus, so no commuting. We moved into that apartment after our sophomore year and had a blast. When I think back on my most favorite college memories, I think about those years in our little studio. Not the days in the dorm.
But as I said upthread, I am glad we did our time in the dorm. It would have been scary for us to navigate the “real world” of rent, utility bills, and annoying neighbors as 18-year-olds fresh out of high school. We were mature for our age, but we were still kids. If we had gone the off-campus housing route right out of the gate, we would totally have needed our parents’ help at finding a place. Which would have robbed us of the fun and excitement of doing that ourselves. Seriously, I remember how proud I was of my “adulting” ability when we secured our apartment all by ourselves. If we had made that my mother’s responsibility, it just wouldn’t have been the same kind of experience.
It isn’t. I did it for the first two years, fairly successfully. But I was also working a part time job that was near my parent’s house. This was important as I had to pay my own way. Ultimately though, I moved to a rooming house and then apartment near campus. I found I was driving to school in the morning, to suburbia to work, back to school for the library and then home again. That’s too much time driving and the parking fees were irritating as the U only had a tiny fraction of contract parking available.
When I landed an internship that was nearer to campus than home, I moved. Money became very, very tight but I didn’t spend all my time driving any more. I could bike to work or take the bus in half the time of the old commute. It also placed me near campus in the evenings so I could explore nightlife a bit more or not feel guilty for typing a paper until 3 am and keeping the parents awake.
My daughterish will have an apartment next year at college after two years in dorms. So Junior year for them and their friends. That’s given them time to find roommates they like (and their parents like and have met), figure out college, make friends on campus, get involved in activities, figure out how to do laundry (the freshman door had a laundry room about 100 feet away from their dorm room) and eat on a schedule that doesn’t have Mom yelling “hey, have you eaten today?” Their random Freshman roommate remains a friend (not a best friend, but will probably always be a friend, someone you can look up when you are in town), as are the people from across the hall.
I wanted a year in dorms for my kid - I think its helpful to the transition process. And at their school midterms and finals are supported through dorm activities (like study snacks and pizza delivered during study nights).
A near campus apartment isn’t going to be that much cheaper - especially after we buy some furniture (they are going to school 1500 miles away), equip a kitchen, and pay the required full year rental.
Two kids. One was custom built to live on their own right away so lived in apartments/condos/houses thru college. The other wasn’t. So two years in dorms but then into shared houses. All went fine for them.
It depends on the kid.
(BTW: I am strongly opposed to forcing students to live in dorms. So do better in other situations plus it can be an extra financial burden for students with other options. The resurgence of in loco parentis is baffling.)
That’s one thing that’s come around since I was in school (1991-1996). Back then, students were effectively considered adults, and more or less expected to behave like them. That said, they weren’t throwing people out willy-nilly, but nor was the university’s residence life (or whatever they call it) department trying to do any kind of in loco parentis type stuff. About the only big no-nos were as follows- no underage drinking and no drug use (both of which are also illegal), and in single-sex dorms, no people of the opposite sex after certain hours.
That was pretty much it- anything else went. And I’d know- I was a RA for a few years. As I understand it, as told by a former RA co-worker who went on to a career in residence life at a few other large state universities, the schools have swung into a much more… invasive/concerned/involved stance w.r.t. the students and their lives.
I’d have hated that, personally. I relished the rather hands-off aspects of the early-mid 1990s college student experience.
Isn’t this because schools are worried about depression among students? I don’t agree with this at all. I can’t imagine any RA being trained as a mental health expert.
We had a thread a few weeks ago about the possibility of colleges using electronic tracking to get hints of possible depression as well as class attendance which I also thought was a horrible idea.
When I was an RA, we were trained into at least how to recognize some potential blatant signs of mental illness- people who didn’t leave their rooms/go to class, who slept all day, drank excessively, doing self-harm type behaviors, or general personality type changes, all of which as described by roommates/friends/dorm neighbors or through our own observations.
At that point, we were supposed to report it up the chain, and they’d set the school’s mental health people on them. I can’t recall whether we were supposed to bring it up with them and suggest that they go see the mental health people or not- the job was strange in that regard- we were supposed to be first-line for some things, and not others.
We weren’t experts by any stretch of the word; at best we were people with a little bit of additional training and who were plugged into the school’s support system. Which is better than nothing; several people in the dorms I worked in did end up getting counseling/psychiatric help based on what their RAs noticed and got the ball rolling on, so it was worth something I guess.
Those were the rules I remember. And as mentioned in the OP, I think the dorm life creates a nice transition period between full parental supervision and complete freedom. In the dorms, you will have ready access to sex, booze, and missing class if that is your choice, but at least it will be somewhat controlled. Sure, at 18 you can probably sneak some beer in, sneak an ounce of weed, sneak your girlfriend in after hours etc. but there won’t be a party with 50 people tearing things up.
Also the social aspect makes you feel a part of the campus and helps you transition. In an off campus apartment, you likely feel alone. In the dorms, everyone is the same boat, so you meet friends to go over to the student union and study.
Off campus housing for schools without dorms are often run like dormitories, the management office rents by the room and utilities may be included. The benefit is the student can rent their own room or share a room but they all have their own responsibility to abide by their own lease. They can sublet too with prior approval. These apartments are usually very near to campus and most students walk or ride bikes. Cars if they have them are parked in public lots so can get expensive to park. One of my kids did share a house with 3 others, 4 bedrooms one bath (yikes) and while they each were listed on the lease they did have to coordinate efforts to pay the bills. I thinfk they used venmo or something like that and it was easy. No one skipped out but it did get weird at times, one roommate wanted to sublet to a much older man who was a prison guard when the others were young twentysomethings. they had to get the landlord involved to reject that applicant.
I never did the dorm thing but went straight into an apartment 200 miles from home with other students I met the day I moved in. Lived in the student housing slums. Ate on campus first two years through the meal plan. Dorms were full by the time all my paperwork went through. Helped having several upperclassmen when it came time 2nd semester as to which professors were good, tough, incompetent. Also associated with their friends at first which was a bit more mature than the “kids” that the school babysat. Also no alcohol in dorms even with an 18yo drinking age, nor questions/issues with who was in bed with you. (dorms were divided by sex back then.)
My sons are/were going to school while living at home. Daughter will be doing the dorm thing next year. She had an option for off campus apartments that are contracted with and through the school but declined.
To me, it seems to have swung the opposite direction. There are no single sex dorms at my daughterish’s school - heck there aren’t single sex rooms - you can room with someone of the opposite gender as a Freshman if you make the arrangements. Drinking? Yeah, so what. Drugs, the dorms smell like the inside of a bong. They do have a rule that if you are sharing a room, any overnight guest is limited to 3 nights a week - so you don’t end up sharing your small double with your roommate and her boyfriend.
They do have things like quiet time in the dorms before midterms and finals - and organize dorm-community socials and such. But other than cleaning the bathroom and taking out the trash (which college did back in the 80s too), there is very little parenting going on in the dorms.
And the RAs are trained to look for signs of depression - and do welfare checks if someone seems to have not emerged. But given that someone managed to have a goat in their room for over a month (it was a single), it isn’t terribly invasive.