Someone posted a comment on a different board about mandatory housing policies at universities. While I enjoyed my on-campus housing experience, I just found out that universities out there have policies that appear to effectively force most students to live on campus housing or at home.
I looked up Arizona State University because that was the one referenced by the other poster:
I searched a bit and see a few other colleges have posted mandatory housing policies too, but are smaller names I don’t recognize.
I understand there is good in building a student life culture and that most would chose dorming or be exempt by living with parents. But I’m curious on a legal level if they are allowed to do this? Isn’t this bundling education services with housing?
Can local investment rental owners/companies by these universities sue under antitrust laws?
I suppose a university could tie the tuition and housing together such that a student must pay for (and will have) a room. I.e., if you aren’t paying for housing as well as tuition, you aren’t fully enrolled. The student is certainly free to go and procure further housing off campus, but will still have to pay for the on campus room.
Why would it be illegal? The contention is that the communal living environment is an essential part of the education that the college wishes to provide, that they’re educating the “whole person” and that extends out of the classrooms, and so they require their students, with few exceptions, to live in campus housing. The college I went to had very draconian rules about living off campus. Unless you were living with family, you had to be, in some fashion (marital status, age, prior education or military service) an atypical student to get an off-campus housing waiver. (Yes, you had to get explicit permission.) Even if you were over 18, fully supporting yourself and living on your own before attending, if you weren’t 24, you had to move into a residence hall.
I can’t really comment on the legality, although the fact that it happens suggests that it’s legal, because i can’t imagine the universities would do it if it weren’t. It’s not like you have to attend any particular university.
i was very surprised, though, to see the OP’s ASU link. I had heard of mandatory on-campus housing at private universities like my grad school Johns Hopkins (where all freshmen and sophomores are required to live in university housing), but i had always assumed that state schools would not have such draconian policies.
Personally, i think the arguments for compulsory housing are basically crap. There’s nothing wrong, per se, with student housing, and if it’s what you want, then great. But the idea that it is essential to the college experience is something i don’t buy for a second.
I’m not arguing that the arguments made on the ASU website are wrong. It could well be that:
But while this might be true in the aggregate, it surely is not true for everyone, and i think that, as adults, students should be able to make their own decisions about where they live.
Admittedly, i come at this issue with my own experiences that inform my opinion. I went to college in Australia, where there’s no such thing as mandatory housing. In fact, most universities in Australia are, to a greater or lesser extent, commuter schools, where students come each day on public transit or by car. I didn’t feel cheated out of any educational or life experience by virtue of living in a rented house with roommates and paying my own rent. Hell, i would argue that this prepared me better for getting by in the world than living in communal housing and lining up for food in the dining room every meal would have done.
I think this would be more of a correlation than a cause. At my school the provided accommodation was significantly more expensive than private accommodation. Only the richer students could afford, that had more time and wealth to become involved in college extra curricula activities…
I can’t see how it would be illegal. It is a condition of enrollment/participation in the school like a bunch of other conditions they put on you.
That being said, looking back I couldn’t agree more about the importance of living on campus for at least your freshman year. Maybe it isn’t the best for everyone, but my experience went downhill after I moved off of campus.
I hate enforced dorm living. Really, really hate it. And it’s particularly sad to see so many schools in recent years going backwards in time.
I was teaching at one college when they adopted this rule and there was no way to argue with these people. They all enjoyed dorm life when they were students so that meant that everybody was just like them and that it had to be crammed down everyones throats.
I tried to explain my 51-49 rule. If 51% of people thought that dorm life was great and therefore everyone would be forced to live on campus, then what if the number was 51% the other way? Would anyone think a rule that required that no one live on campus would ever fly? The tyranny of the majority.
Whether dorm living improves grades or not simply does not matter. This is a personal decision and it’s up to the students and their families to decide. I’ve seen too many students have to quit a good school because they lived on their own but couldn’t afford/manage living in a dorm. E.g., one person I knew who could live at an aunt’s house for free near campus. Sorry, no. So she had to change to a lesser school.
People never think of the details. What about a married student? Whose spouse works. Make an exception to that. Okay, what about a gay couple? They can’t be officially married in most states, so do you make an exception for them? What about other non-married partners? Maybe they are just roomates. When does the nosiness into people’s personal life end?
As far as legality goes, for private schools, there’s not much that can be done. But I hope that there would be some way for state schools to be challenged. Especially since here it’s a school-by-school decision. (Many don’t have enough housing.) It amounts to discrimination against students of certain socio-economic classes which affects some groups more than others.
Most big schools have married student apartments but I have never seen a requirement that married students live in them. They normally are very cheap so many choose to live there.
For most big state schools I’ve only heard of freshmen being required to live on campus.
I can think of several reasons schools might enforce on-campus living as a matter of policy:1. A school might have a large investment in dormitories and cafeterias that would go to waste below some occupancy level.
2. A school might need some minimum number of students paying for on-campus living to subsidize needy students.
3. A small school in a large city might feel that it will lose cohesiveness if its students live scattered about.
4. A school might create a lot of tension with the local town if it created a large number of transient renters.
When I was an undergrad, I lived on-campus the entire time because my scholarship required it. It also completely paid for my room and board, so I had little reason to complain. Plus the dorm that I lived in had a GPA minimum to stay in it, so a lot of idiots were relocated.
As to Freshmen, dorms have RAs and other support structures in place that help ensure a transition to college life. Someone to keep an eye out if a person is becoming isolated, depressed, not doing their work, abusive bf/gf, self-harm, eating disorders, etc. And some freshmen are still minors.
Having gone to university in Canada, where (like Australia) there is no mandatory live-on-campus rule, I would agree. Yes, you could live in student housing if you wished, or with friends in a rented house, or in your own apartment, or with your parents, or in any other living situation–the school simply didn’t care. And yet, our colleges and universities, I’m sure much like Australia’s, managed to turn out well-educated, well-rounded students, who had enjoyed all manner of school sports and activities during their years at school, in spite of not living on campus.
The problem I have with this, of course, is where does the ‘compelled housing’ resident go during the breaks where the on campus housing is closed? It was a minor issue at the state college I attended for the international students. Spring break was too short to go “home,” but too long to stay in a hotel (cost issues). Summer & winter break were similar issues, as the travel to/from “home” could be prohibitive.
On campus housing was not, however, compulsory at that university, so there were off-campus options for those students, but most freshmen showed up with a dorm reservation to avoid the hassle of showing up in a new location with no housing pre-arranged.
I have no numbers to back this up, but I think that most colleges in America are, more or less, commuter schools. And if you read the ASU policy carefully, only freshmen are required to live on campus. That policy may be new to ASU but it was the policy at the private Northeastern university I attended twenty years ago. The reason, I think, is that most incoming freshmen have always lived in their parents’ house and have no experience living on their own. (You should see how much trouble some freshmen have doing their own laundry.)
In the U.S. there are different sorts of colleges and universities. Some (typically small, private liberal arts colleges, which cater to just-out-of-high school young people) are essentially boarding schools. There are no part-time students, and being enrolled at one of these is a matter of being a member of an educational community rather than just taking classes. (IMO, students should be able to make their own decisions about what kind of school they enroll in, but if they choose to go to this kind of institution, living on campus is part of the package.)
Another type of school is the large university (private or state). Many of these try to appeal to several different types of students, and to provide different sorts of educational experiences. So some of these try to offer, as an option, a similar kind of collegiate experience as that of the residential kind of college I discussed above. I suppose this is the category that ASU falls into.
I’m well aware of how it works. Look at my location field. I came to the United States in the first place specifically to attend grad school.
I never said it wasn’t part of the package. I never said that it should be illegal. What i said was that i think the rationale behind mandatory housing is silly. You explaining the different types of institutions to me (when i already know what they are) isn’t going to change that.
Some students who don’t go home for break often get invited to visit friends’ families, so they’re gone anyway, and a few professors invite some of their students to stay with them. IIRC, though, my university simply moved the rest into one dorm for the longer breaks and offered limited meal service.
I don’t think mandatory housing should be a requirement for more than a semester. Some people will never adapt to communal living, and it’s not fair to force them or the people they live with to put up with it.
Not fair? No one is forcing them to do anything. All they have to do is go to university somewhere where the school doesn’t require freshmen to live on campus.