Helpful Hints on College Housing

College-bound high school seniors and their families are at the home stretch where they must narrow down your short list to one school. Academics are certainly a consideration, so is comfort and fit. Part of comfort and fit is satisfaction with college housing.

You will see that there are varied approaches to college housing. If you’re offered admission to an honors program, for example, you may also receive an invitation to live in an honors residence hall or floor. Other schools group incoming freshmen together through survey responses or choices of freshmen seminars. Some schools reserve entire halls for freshmen; others mix students of different classes together. Some schools designed their college housing to be corridor-style (several double rooms share a common bathroom and lounge), others suite style (a smaller number of students share a lounge and bathroom). Some schools offer living/learning communities around areas of academic or personal interest.

Ideally, you visited your short list of schools before submitting applications and got a glimpse of a typical freshman room. Now that acceptances are in, arrange for your student to visit friends who live in such a room, or ask the admissions office to arrange a Friday night visit for you. Incoming students should know what its like to live in a residence hall on  a Friday night, when the current students have no classes the next day.

Some questions to keep in your head:

• Did students leave the hall to go out, or did they stay in? Did they go home for the weekend? A quiet floor on a Friday night sparks those questions. Personally, I do not like too much quiet, unless there are activities that frequently draw people out of the hall.
• If they stayed in, what did they do? Party, study, or something else? Ideally, a campus environment should strike a balance between activities in the hall and outside of it. There is a time to study, but there is also time for fun. And it’s very hard to make friends among people who study all the time.
• Is the hall close to places you are likely to go to if you choose to enroll? Is it near classes, the student center, sports facilities, entertainment and so on? Or do you need to rely on a bike or bus to get to those places? I was fortunate enough to have a car for all but one semester of college, and I could actually park close to where I lived. But that’s less the case today.
• Are there other halls where you might prefer to live if you choose that school? Prospective students should give themselves enough time to look around campus and learn about all of their living options. They should not limit themselves to their friend’s choices.
• If the school triples freshmen, when are they offered a chance to de-triple? If not, what is the difference in cost between a standard double room and the triple room?
• If Greek life may become “your thing,” when is the first semester that you can pledge? When I started college thirty six years ago, first-semester freshmen were allowed to pledge fraternities or sororities. Today, more schools require students to wait until the second semester or the sophomore year. Part of the reason is that the drinking age is universally 21; it was 18 in New Jersey when I was in college, and 18 in many other states. Another reason is that the more effort you make to engage students in the residence halls, the most likely those students will stay in your school. It’s extremely difficult to engage students if they’re frequently out of the hall for pledging.
• How did the resident advisor (RA) interact with students on the floor? When I was in school I knew RAs who organized activities very well, and took the effort to know all of their students. I also knew others who did next to nothing. Ideally, you want to know that the RA will be helpful when you need help. One interesting note, the better residence life programs appear to be at schools where there is a higher level of school spirit and early engagement. Some schools that stand out: Indiana University-Bloomington, Miami University of Ohio and the University of Georgia.
• What is the condition of common areas such as bathrooms, laundry rooms, lounges and kitchens? Students are responsible for their own rooms; some are neat, others not. But common areas are the responsibility of everyone who lives in the building and the maintenance crew. A friend of mine, a vice president of an excellent public university, once told me that “if you give students nice things, they will respect them.” He’s overseen the construction of some of the nicest residence halls I’ve visited, and I’ve seen that the students on his campus do care.

•  How is the hall governed? I realize this may not be the first thing that comes to mind for students, but it is important. The student voice in residence life is different from campus to campus. Some schools have “dorm clubs” that have very little money and the students have little say in the operation of the hall. Others are residential colleges where the students have a larger budget, more resources and a stronger voice. The practices depend on how the student population changes from year to year. A freshman-only hall is more likely to have a club; it better supports a population that comes and goes. A hall that accommodates all classes or only upper-class students is likely to have more resources; the school wants to have students who will stay in the hall for more than a year.
• Will you be more comfortable in a single-sex or co-ed hall? I’ve learned about all sorts of living arrangements, even mixed gender rooms (very rare). To me, an all-male floor with a lazy RA would have been a personal disaster. But I know people who would have liked that arrangement. In fact, they chose a similar one when they joined fraternities. But I also went to Rutgers at a time when it had a women’s college (Douglass) and met women who enjoyed living in all-female houses and residence halls.
• Do you want to live around many people, or few? Personally, I prefer corridor-style halls for freshmen. They get to meet more people faster than they would living in smaller suites. Suites are wonderful for students who have had the time to form a circle of friends that want to live together and are willing to share responsibility for the bathroom and common lounge.
• How’s the food? Most colleges will force freshmen who live in college housing to buy the most or second-most expensive meal plan. This is less of a problem at schools like Gettysburg, Purdue or Virginia Tech, where students have high praise for the food. It’s a major source of complaints at other schools. Ideally, you don’t want to spend too much money to eat meals elsewhere while you’re on the meal plan.

College housing comes in all sorts of arrangements, none really the “best” for everyone. It’s up to you, as customers to consider which will be the best for you not only for the first year, but those afterwards.

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