No Residency Requirement

Student Lounge College Life
1

<p>Hello, I have lurked this site for a long time (having a weird interest in boarding schools and universities that I could never hope to get into), and have a question I am asking out of curiosity.</p>

<p>A lot of the the top-rate schools seem to have some kind of residency requirement, where you have to spend 1, 2, 3 or even all 4 years of your undergraduate in the residence of your school, with offcampus living being only allowed if you are married or live with your parents.</p>

<p>Does EVERY good-to-top-tier school in the States (I'm from Canada, by the way), have this requirement. Maybe it's because living in my univeristy's residences are at least as bad as hell (from word of mouth; I live with my parents), but this seems to me like an unncessary, instrusive, asinine, ridiculous, cruel, big-brother, nanny state, bureacratic, and malevolent requirement, and downrite MEAN-SPIRITED, and one that would be a reason for me not to go to that school.</p>

<p>If anyone could justify it, that would be cool. But please, spare me the "it fosters community" generic words that I could get from the university's website.</p>

<p>Anyways, are there any major schools, that do not have this requirement. That let students live wherever they want? If there are no major schools, what is the cloest one to major?</p>

<p>Again, this is just out of curiosity. I look forward to periodically asking more questions of you members of the educated elite.</p>

2

<p>I think most major universities let you live off-campus. I’ll be a sophomore next year and I’m living off-campus, and freshmen don’t have to live on-campus here. I always thought the smaller schools were the only ones who forced you to live all four years on-campus. I know some schools make freshmen live in dorms, etc, but that’s all I’ve ever heard about from the bigger universities. Maybe the Ivies are different, I neither know nor care.</p>

3

<p>Can you name any large US universities which force students to live in university housing? I think very few if any universities require students live in university housing. The situation might be different in colleges.</p>

<p>Anyway, the University of Michigan does not require you live in university housing. Most students do their freshman year, but it is not required.</p>

4

<p>I don’t think most state schools do, and there are some very, very, very good state schools in the US.</p>

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<p>Yeah, Canada must be different.</p>

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<p>Usually a “residency requirement” refers to academics, not housing: students need to be enrolled (and sometimes physically present) at a particular university for a minimum amount of time or credits in order to get a degree from that university. It doesn’t matter whether you live on or off campus though. In other words, there’s a limit on the number of credits earned off campus that can be counted towards the degree. </p>

<p>What you CANNOT do: complete two years at your local state university, transfer to Harvard, immediately enroll in a study-abroad program for a year, then take a semester’s worth of independent study credits at Harvard while working with professors at Berkeley, take a single semester of classes at Harvard and expect to get a Harvard degree for that. </p>

<p>Examples of this use of the word: </p>

<p><a href=“http://www.college.upenn.edu/seniors/residency.php[/url]”>http://www.college.upenn.edu/seniors/residency.php&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“http://www.brynmawr.edu/catalog/2008-09/curriculum/residency.shtml[/url]”>http://www.brynmawr.edu/catalog/2008-09/curriculum/residency.shtml&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“http://www.washington.edu/students/ugrad/advising/aif/resreq.html[/url]”>http://www.washington.edu/students/ugrad/advising/aif/resreq.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>Then there’s on-campus housing. A number of residential colleges (= boarding schools at the college level) require students to live on campus barring exceptional circumstances, but that’s not quite as common as an academic residency requirement.</p>

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<p>Thank you all for humoring me.</p>

<p>b@r!um: I think your point was the best (no offence, other people). I did not know that residency had that other meaning, I just assumed it referred to staying in residence (although I HAVE heard the term as it relates to a medical residency).</p>

<p>That being said, I don’t think it’s as rare as some are making it out to be. For instance, Vanderbilt University is known for enforcing this rule, all four years you must live in a university dorm. This fact is on the Wikipedia page. When I heard about this, I was curious to see if other schools have the same rule, and a lot had a “residency” requirement, which I took to mean living there.</p>

<p>As another example, Tulane University also forces its first- and second-year students to live in its dorms: [Tulane</a> University - Second-Year Housing Requirement](<a href=“http://tulane.edu/studentaffairs/housing/under/second-year-housing-requirement.cfm]Tulane”>http://tulane.edu/studentaffairs/housing/under/second-year-housing-requirement.cfm).</p>

<p>Duke University requires its students to live there for three years: [Duke</a> University | Student Affairs | Residence Life & Housing Services | Three-Year Requirement](<a href=“Duke Student Affairs”>Duke Student Affairs).</p>

<p>Yale requires students to live there for two years: [Yale</a> College Residential Requirement Upheld by Court<a href=“a%20news%20article%20about%20how%20some%20students%20failed%20to%20overturn%20this”>/url</a>.</p>

<p>Anyways, the four examples above, on the links, are unequivocally referring to living in the residences/dorms on-campus for some number of years. Rather than what b@r!um was referring to.</p>

<p>So, I ask then, are those four schools, which I chose somewhat at random, exceptions to the general rule? Or is perhaps this requirement a more prevalent phenomenon than we thought?</p>

<p>thanks</p>

<p>EDIT: The above being said, the College of William and Mary apparently does not have this rule. While they claim 75% of their students live on campus for all 4 years, there is no mention of a reqirement. And they actually have a link for off campus housing. <a href=“http://www.wm.edu/campuslife/housing/index.php[/url]”>http://www.wm.edu/campuslife/housing/index.php](<a href=“http://opac.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=5627]Yale”>http://opac.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=5627)</a></p>

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<p>I think private schools generally have more of these rules than public schools. Also bigger schools have less of these rules. </p>

<p>For the record, my school, UW-Madison, has no such rules, nor enough housing to allow even all freshmen to live on campus if they wished.</p>

9

<p>The state schools that I looked at required/guaranteed housing for freshmen, but after that almost every student was kicked out of university housing because there’s not enough room.</p>

<p>I think smaller colleges have those required living rules.</p>

<p>Although I know that at a local college, they have 99% of students living on campus and it isn’t required any of the years. They just have really, really nice housing for upperclassmen.</p>