Googled a quick look. 23 kids from Oregon last year, 120 from California. So there ya go I guess 
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Maybe not really that weird. Reed seems to attract a certain type of student and also too close for some Oregon kids if they are going to a private. Many/most kids still go to CC or public schools , regardless of state. If you’re fairly local and want to go to a private, probably more cachet with going to Dartmouth than Reed!
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California has a population of 39 million. Oregon has a population of 4.2 million.
Thanks, I am aware that California is bigger than Oregon. 
Yes, but I suspect that @lkg4answers was pointing that out because it means that per capita, Oregon sends close to twice as many students to Reed than California does.
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As was discussed up thread
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I live next to the Reed neighborhood and enjoy walking through campus regularly, I think Reed is such a special case - it does attract a very niche student! The current student I know there is my college roommate’s kid (from the East Coast), and she’s one of the classic Reed kids that already has their Phd. mapped out.
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Such a beautiful area, I love walking there too!
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This site offers information on this: https://www.usnews.com/best-colleges/rankings/most-on-campus.
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Great resource!
Among the schools we have visited so far, you can see Amherst high on that list at 98%. And that was definitely appealing to my S24. We discussed this a bit, and I agree that most of the students living on campus provides for an easy continuity of friendships, informal activities, more formal associations, and so on. Not that living off campus is completely incompatible with that, but living and eating together are typically important aspects of community building, interest sharing, organizing, and so on.
Obviously, though, this is in part a question of setting. Like, a college in an area without much student housing nearby may naturally be higher on these lists. I dare say that is at least part of why, say, Princeton (94%) is on that list, not yet Yale (according to US News they are at 79%). Or Carleton (96%) but not yet Macalester (62%).
However, clearly there is also a variation in how much colleges even try to provide housing for all four years. Some guarantee it, some don’t. Some clearly have far too little on-campus housing for more than a minority of their students to live on-campus after first year. They are not necessarily doing anything wrong, it is just how their housing system works.
But again, for my S24, the vision of most people staying on, or at least very near, campus is appealing. I note on that last nuance, William & Mary (68% on campus per US News) in discussing this issue claimed most of the people living off campus still lived in housing on the streets in Willamsburg right next to campus, so were really not meaningfully separated from campus life.
And in that context, we were introduced to the concept of a “suitcase school” (probably already familiar to many, but it was new to me). Here is one online definition:
That is an extreme, but even holding aside people entirely leaving the area on weekends and such, it does seem to me like if people are barely moving off campus but still otherwise participating in campus life on evenings and weekends and such, that is probably less of a concern. And based on the discussions we have had so far, that might include William & Mary and Yale. And I am interested to see what Macalester says.
At UVA, though, it is only 38% on campus (and apparently most of those freshmen). And while I am not sure exactly how far people are moving, the impression we got is it is a big enough school there is a pretty significant dispersion. Incidentally, I was very familiar with the University of Michigan back in the day, and it was the same there–people quickly moved out of the dorms and dispersed throughout Ann Arbor. Old information at this point, but US News says they are at 28% on-campus, so maybe that is still pretty accurate. I was also familiar with another large public, same deal where at least a lot of students moved out into various parts of the surrounding city, and they are currently around 40% per US News.
OK, so long story short–to my S24, 90s sounds good! But maybe also somewhat less than that, as long as the popular off campus housing is mostly really near campus. But, say, under 50%, particularly at a larger college . . . not so desirable.
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I think the priority that the amount of people living on campus takes when a high schooler is looking at schools vs. the evolution they go through once living on their own makes me think it could be weighted with a little grain of salt.
Once they get on their own, meet people who live in nearby apartments and see how campus life goes on and that it’s fun to live with no campus oversight, it might be less of a big deal than it appears when they don’t know anything about living on their own
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Macalester only requires first and second-year students to live on campus. From their website, “All first-year and sophomore students are required to live on-campus. About one-fourth of the junior class and one fifth of the senior class also live on campus.” About - Residential Life - Macalester College
This makes sense given its location in a residential neighborhood of St. Paul. Macalester may not have enough on-campus housing to require living on campus for more than two years and probably doesn’t have the acreage to build enough dorms to accommodate most of its juniors and seniors.
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Re living on campus, my D22 goes to a highly residential college and she would LOVE it if she could move off campus. She likes the school fine, but hates living in a dorm and would much rather live in an apartment.
Way, way, way back in the day when I was in college you could still keep applying to get in the dorm in upperclass years (first years were required to live on campus) but most people wanted to get out of the dorms and have their own apartment. I did end up in the dorms all 4 years just because I kept getting back in through the lottery and was too daunted about the prospect of finding an apartment, but living off campus was clearly the preferred option for most kids. I don’t think social life suffered at all for kids living off campus. It was probably better. Sports (I went to a big school) was still a big draw on game days. Plenty of activities on campus for off campus and on campus folks too.
Unfortunately for my D22 she will have to suffer through dorm life for at least one more year. Her school does have some (really nice!) apartments on campus for the juniors and seniors and I know she’s hoping for one of those, but they are lottery picks. I don’t know what she will do if she doesn’t get in one – probably melt into a puddle of angst.
I’m not sure why most students would not want an apartment with a kitchen! separate bedrooms! a living room! maybe two bathrooms! instead of having everything they own crammed into a single room they have to share with a roommate. (Why did I do that for four years?? Lazy,I think or cheap. )
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Sure, which is also true about almost everything people think they will value as HS students. Many people evolve a lot in college, academic and career goals can change radically, their preferences may (often will) adapt to the norms of their college, and so on.
Still, I actually personally think this is in a category of things where maybe more, and not less, consideration than average is warranted. Like, comparing notes with my peers from HS, I think there was an effect where the people who went to big colleges with lots of off campus housing were most likely to have less involvement with college life and more ongoing involvement with HS friends and such. Some of this was a distance thing, but even among just those who stayed in state, the ones who went to, say, small LACs with high on-campus (or very-near-campus) living tended (on average) to end up more focused on their new friends and activities and such, and the ones who went to the big publics with high levels of dispersed off-campus living less so.
And I don’t think that means everyone should have gone to a small LAC. That said, I do think more of the big public people ended up having the “just a number/hard to make friends” problem. But I also think more of the small LAC people ended up having the “have to join a frat/sorority to have a social life” problem. And so on. People I knew ended up less than thrilled with their overall college experience in many different ways.
But looking back, I would say of my peers who did not end up loving their college experience, some sort of mismatch like this often ended up being at least a big part of that. Of course it is impossible to know if they would have been happier somewhere else. But at least to the extent they were discussing the things that made them less than happy, it seemed to me these housing/setting factors were very often involved.
So yes, you can only make educated guesses as a HS student, and possibly you will adapt to a variety of different environments. But still, to me, this is actually one of the better ways to narrow a list, meaning to think carefully about what sort of overall environment sounds like a good fit.
Indeed, and in fact at the more selective schools where four years of on campus housing is the norm, you can usually see they have a lot of singles, suites, and apartments available. It may still be some sort of lottery situation, but in most systems I know about, at least the juniors and seniors are extremely likely to be able to do something in the range of a single, comfortable suite, or apartment.
And in fact, it seems like there is an ongoing “arms race” at many of these colleges to do more and more of that. Meaning they are building more apartment-style housing, renovating existing housing to have more suites, and so on. Because they recognize that today, the traditional small concrete box double on a hall with a shared bathroom isn’t cutting it to stay competitive, at least not past freshman year (and even then . . .).
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Why do you think your son would want to live in a dorm room for 4 years? It’s cramped at best.
I hope my D22 gets in an on-campus apartment next year. They are very nice with granite countertops and all instead of the cinderblock walls of the dorms.
I live in a college town rife with student apartments and dang! some of those places are very nice. I don’t think my D22’s college can compete with the fanciest ones here in town, but it will be a huge step up from the dorms. Off campus housing is definitely preferred here in our college town.
I think we covered this, but briefly: obviously he would not want to live all four years in a traditional small concrete box double on a hall with a shared bathroom. He is very open to living in on-campus suites and apartments and such.
For that matter, we visited Yale, and the residential college system is pretty appealing to him as well. Interestingly, many of the residential colleges actually have their freshmen live on Old Campus (concentrated by residential college, meaning all the freshmen from a given residential college will make up a building or side of building). I note even those are not typical dorms.
And some Yale college students then only live a year or so in their residential college before moving off campus (although many also stay in their residential college). However, they are still members of their residential college all four years, even if they don’t actually live there. This, of course, is similar to how the college system works at, say, Oxford, on which it was very consciously modeled.
I think all that struck him as a system which really allowed for both robust community-building and individual flexibility. It is also quite expensive to create and operate, which probably explains why it is not a more common model. Harvard and Rice have a similar system, of course, and I think there are more. Other universities may offer one or more residential colleges as an option for a few students, but not all.
More common these days, it seems, are the proliferation of special interest/affiliation residential communities. These could in fact be Greek organizations at some schools, but they could also be identity organizations, international students, shared academic interest communities, people who share a love of cooking (I’d be interested to know how they address the obvious free-rider problem), and so on. Anyway, the college will then dedicate a certain residential building, or perhaps just a certain floor or so on, to the members of that community.
Again, presumably these models are most attractive where those residential colleges, or dedicated buildings/floors, and so on, actually have nice housing options and not just traditional concrete block doubles.
This. My daughter’s freshman year dorm was so small (and she had a roommate!) I gave her a lot of credit for making the best of a tiny room. Her freshman year was during the emergence from Covid so if they got it, they were still required to quarantine in their dorm for five days. Lucky for her, we live less than 3 hours away so when she did test positive (which was inevitable), she was able to come home for the week.
Being able to move into an apartment, with a living area, kitchen & their own bed/bath is a reward for freshman year in the dorm, the caveat being that most of the fanciest and newest apartment complexes often have the highest price tags. I wish I had the foresight to have gotten into the off-campus housing development business. Those folks have got to be killing it!
It’s also a necessary part of learning to “adult”. Cooking for themselves, budgeting, grocery shopping, resolving maintenance issues, paying for utilities, learning to manage roommates who don’t do their share of the cleaning, etc.
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Again this is just anecdotal, but I lived on campus all four years during the term, but in apartments during the summer, and that seemed to be sufficient for me to learn some basic adulting. In fact, my first graduate school roommate had lived off campus I think most of college, and he was one of those roommates who was completely terrible at adulting.
So yes, an important thing to eventually be good at. But I am not sure you actually need to live off campus in college to get there when it is needed.
I think the more obvious point is just that at some colleges, there are very few “nice” on-campus options available. So of course if you are going to such a college, you will likely want to move off campus.
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