Hi, I’m wondering how graduate students find housing. My first year of grad school at Boston University, I did everything through the school and it was convenient but very expensive. What are people’s thoughts on finding housing through their institutions vs. finding housing on their own? I’m working on a project and trying to find out as much about housing as I can because I think people often face real difficulties during this process and I’m interested in improving it.
After my son accepted an offer from a grad school, he was given access to their housing portal (where students post looking for roommates or seeking roommates). The first day he found a listing from two current grad students looking for a third student to fill a vacancy in their 3-bedroom apartment. He contacted them and they took it from there. He will be moving in at the end of June. It wasn’t hard (or expensive).
My son moved into a grad dorm. He had a suite with a friend he met during all the interviews.
Depends entirely on the city and the university’s housing quality and availability for graduate students. I went to Columbia, and at Columbia there was more demand for graduate student housing than supply (particularly for health sciences students). The accommodations also weren’t all apartment-style; some of them were traditional dormitory-style apartments with single rooms and some were “studio singles” with no kitchen or oven in them. Yet the prices were comparable to what you could pay for a regular apartment in the Washington Heights and Inwood neighborhoods, which is where the medical center campus was located. So I chose to live “off-campus” in a non-university owned building, as did many of my classmates. My building was only 4 blocks to the medical center and was literally next door to a university owned building, so even though technically it was “off-campus housing” it was actually closer than some of the university housing in the Bronx.
Particularly in their later years some students simply preferred to live outside of the neighborhood Columbia was in and establish a home in one of the boroughs, for example. I had a lot of friends who moved to Brooklyn, and recently more friends moving to areas in Queens.
And at other universities, there is plenty of graduate housing, and/or the graduate housing is high quality and far less expensive than you could find in the surrounding area - so people opt to go through there. Even within the same university, there may be differences. Columbia had two separate housing systems for graduate students. The one for health sciences and medical students was as I described above, but the system for students at the main campus was much better and the housing in the Morningside Heights area was subsidized to the point where it was far cheaper than anything you could rent on the market in the same neighborhood (Morningside Heights was simply more expensive). The quality of the housing was also much better. So most of my classmates on the main campus in non-health/medicine programs went through the university housing.