Mnemosyne, it might just be. I don’t think my school requires us to live on campus our freshman year. However, I do think they know they don’t have to. In my three semesters here, I’ve only met one person who was local. And I know, and they know, that housing is so ridiculous here that no freshman will ever be able to live off campus their first year.
So instead they’re nice about it and say they “guarantee housing for all freshmen”.
FWIW, nobody is forced to live in a dorm where I go to college (GMU). I have frosh friends who live at home, but I believe as a general rule that frosh who want to live on-campus can’t stay in the upper-class dorms.
At my school we are rquired to live in the dorms for all four years, although there are a couple of exceptions. Students with parents who live in town are allowed to live at home (they aren’t supposed to live on their own, although I don’t know how or if the school checks up on this), and students who are married or have children can live off-campus. No husbands or children may live in the dorms.
Students who are over 25 have special status and do not need to live on campus, but there are two or three who have chosen to do so. The only one I know personally is an international student, and it makes more sense for her to just live in the dorm rather than try to find an apartment for the short time she will be in the US.
Like mnemosyne, I wonder if this is an American thing. I’ve attended four different universities in Canada, and none of them had a residency requirement.
I tried hunting around to find a comprehensive list of schools that have a freshman residency requirement (or even a percentage figure), but failed.
However, I search http://www.google.com under “freshman residency requirement” and got tons of hits. Most were from colleges explaining theirs.
Appearing on the first page were: University of Montana; University of Central Arkansas; Florida Tech; Austin Peay State; Valdosta State; and (I think) Indiana University of Pennsylvania. In most of the policies that I took a quick glance at, exceptions for married students, students from in town, or students above a certain age were mentioned. While the general idea was usually the same, precise details seemed to vary a bit.
FRR’s are far from universal, but they do seem to be fairly common in the US.
> I went to a school that had a 4-year residence hall
> requirement. It was fine. The dorms were extraordinarily
> nice (they’d have to be, wouldn’t they?), and the food
> service was tops. We also had the right to have overnight
> guests of the opposite sex on weekends. The nice thing
> was, freshmen had access to upperclassmen–everyone was
> integrated.
One thing that should be noted that there are colleges where living in the dorms wasn’t a confining experience. Even more than CrankyAsAnOldMan’s school, consider my undergrad school (New College in Sarasota, Florida). The college didn’t expect to act in loco parentis very much for the students. All the dorms were small and every room either opened to the outside on its own or was part of a wing with 10 people with its own door leading outside. The college didn’t consider it part of its job to go around checking who was in the rooms (although the security guards did stop outsiders from coming onto campus at night). There were no separate dorms for freshman. There were no RA’s (although there were counselors for people who wanted to go see them). Although the college didn’t assign rooms to mixed-sex couples, since they didn’t going around checking the rooms, there was nothing to stop two couples from having the two guys sign up as roommates and the two girls sign up as roommates and then live in the rooms as two mixed-sex couples.
All this was part of New College’s educational policy (which you can read about at their website if you do a search). For instance, a course was anything you and one professor agreed was a course. A major was anything you and two professors agreed was a major. At New College, it clearly wasn’t “like not really being a “grown up” yet.” They treated you as an adult.