Why do so many students live off campus?

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
1

<p>Hi, I am going to attend UChicago in the fall, and I just wanted to have some clarification on something that seems a little off: the prevalence of people who live off campus.</p>

<p>Many people cite that 60% of the student body lives on campus. But with some manipulation by factoring in that all first years are required to live on-campus, only 47% of 2nd to 4th years choose to live on-campus. </p>

<p>What is intriguing about this statistic is that a place like Yale, with the Residential College System that UC seems to try to emulate, has 87% of the student body live on campus. Perhaps one can chalk this up to the type of area that Yale is located in. But Columbia, with a similarly urban location, has 95% of students live on campus. </p>

<p>Why does UChicago have comparatively a much lower percentage of students who choose to live on campus. Housing is apparently guaranteed all four years, so what is it that makes the students favor off-campus housing?</p>

<p>Is it that students prioritize the young adult urge to live independently over the convenience of not having to negotiate the brisk wind when going to classes or the oft-visited library?</p>

<p>Do upperclassmen not feel at home on-campus?</p>

<p>Or, most damning of all, is the on-campus experience that bad?</p>

2

<p>The reason most people cite is cost. Hyde park apartments are, on the whole, both remarkably cheap and spacious - it’s possible to get an apartment near campus for ~40% less then on-campus housing, and which is three or four times bigger than the mean dorm room. Notably, there are many apartments closer to campus then some of the outlying dorms.
As to culture, the housing system’s quality varies massively from dorm to dorm; ranging from excellent to virtually non existent.</p>

3

<p>Have you seen the cost of the dorms? Ridiculous.</p>

4

<p>I didn’t realize cost was that big of an issue with the dorms. But I guess it’s a positive that there are plenty of viable off-campus alternatives.</p>

5

<p>Chicago had its house system 20 years before Yale had residential colleges, by the way. Chicago also had faux-gothic buildings 20 years before Yale. I think it’s safe to say, though, that Yale did a somewhat better job than Chicago of Gothic Residential College 2.0 (and 3.0, and 4.0).</p>

<p>There are two big differences between Chicago and Yale in this respect. Three, actually. First, Yale has dorm space for 90% of its students; Chicago doesn’t. You can’t live on campus if there’s no bed for you. Chicago has a long-term goal of increasing the number of on-campus spaces, but for the past couple of decades it has essentially been going sideways, replacing decrepit old dorms with shiny new ones, but not generating more than a couple hundred additional beds/closets. Second, Yale’s investment in its residential colleges is staggering. They are far more elaborate than any Chicago dorm. Each has courtyard(s), its own dining room, recreation facilities, theaters, practice rooms, etc. What’s more, there is a variety of housing. Seniors live in much nicer, more luxurious digs than sophomores. There’s something to look forward to. With South Campus, Chicago tried to build that feature in, somewhat. But Chicago spent about $150 million to build a dorm with space for 800 students. Yale’s budget for two new residential colleges, housing a total of 1,000 students, is more than four times that. And that’s just to ensure that the new colleges are up to the standard of the old ones, while Chicago’s new dorm was designed to surpass the rest of its undergraduate housing. Yale also spent well over $1B over the past decade renovating the existing colleges.</p>

<p>In other words, the difference in value between Yale’s undergraduate housing (approximately $4.5B) and Chicago’s (charitably $500M) is probably a figure equal to more than half of the entire University of Chicago endowment (which is a top-ten endowment, not small in any meaningful way). This isn’t a knock on the University of Chicago, by the way. One can legitimately question whether Yale should spend what it spends on dorm rooms, and whether all that cost really improves the student experience proportionately.</p>

<p>The third difference is more or less the obverse of the first. Chicago has a lot of relatively cheap, relatively high-quality, student-appropriate rental housing in the immediate campus area, much more than Yale has. Chicago students living off-campus are not commuters. They are living with other students in student (or student-faculty-staff) ghettos blocks from campus, often closer than some of the official dorms. Some buildings come to resemble theme houses. For years, the Ultimate Frisbee team members dominated a building they dubbed “Pepperland”; my son spent one-year in an 8-unit building, literally across the street from a dorm, in which every unit had multiple people involved in the University Theater. A private bedroom in a shared apartment with a living room, dining are, and kitchen, and a lot of space, can cost much less than a bed in a 200-sq.-ft. dorm double.</p>

<p>The presence of these thousands of undergraduates off-campus in Hyde Park, renting apartments, shopping in stores, walking the streets, means that landlords continue to invest in maintaining their properties, business owners open stores catering to the students, and University police patrol the whole neighborhood. All of that is good for the University, not bad. </p>

<p>It will be a delicate thing for the University to increase the number of students living on campus without degrading the quality of the surrounding neighborhood in Hyde Park. It’s clear the Zimmer administration has decided it needs to do that to go toe-to-toe with HYPS in the Admission Wars (and toe-to-toe with HYPS is where they plan to be). In an alternate universe (call it “Penn” perhaps), a similarly rational university administration might have decided that building and maintaining weird apartment buildings for students was a poor use of university capital, and that if private developers were willing to pick up the slack using their own capital, that was a good way to maximize investment in the overall quality of a university education.</p>

6

<p>JHS - Thank you so much for sharing your insight on student housing at UChicago.</p>

7

<p>There is also a maturity factor to consider. Because the house system drops participants forcibly or voluntarily each year (more 1st years than 2nd, more 2nd years than 3rd, etc.) if you hang around to your 3rd or 4th year depending on your particular house you may feel out of place. </p>

<p>Also, housing at Chicago is not merely a roof over your head, there is a forced social attribute to it. As a result, there are definitely students that come to dislike the artificial familiarity / socialization with people who have no common interests or habits. The only reason I bring this up is that I have noticed parents sometimes don’t get the difference between house life and living in a large, couple thousand bedroom cinder block dorm as found at many state schools (were the only required relationship is with your roommates / suitemates).</p>

8

<p>Some people like the social aspects of the houses, and it is possible to maintain a relationship with one’s house after moving out of the dorms. S played on his house’s intramural teams and occasionally attended house events after he moved into an apartment. As others have said, students who live off-campus in Hyde Park still have a very university-centered life–but one can get a nicer place for less money. You save money on the rent itself, and most students can also save quite a bit more by getting off the meal plan.</p>

9

<p>The Dorm room charges are not that much different from living outside, DD is paying about $600/mo for her share of apartment in Hyde Park, room charges is about $2300/qtr, however the apartments are on yearly lease, so you still have to pay while on summer vacation, unless you stay and work in Chicago. On top of the apartment charges, you have to pay your own internet, buy your own supplies etc.</p>

<p>DD saves a lot of money on food, she does not eat much and you can save big time if you cook. The meal plan costs around $1700/qtr.</p>

<p>Social life is a major factor in Dorm Life, you can make lots of friends if you like social.</p>

10

<p>Interestingly, the rate of students who return to live in housing is increasing. From my own House, I’ve witnessed “record” numbers of third years and second years staying in the House. A recent message went out to all students telling us that the rate of return to housing is much higher than before and that there is simply not enough room because of this. They also asked students if anyone was thinking of living in an apartment instead of Housing so that there will be room for the 1st years.</p>

<p>While UChicago isn’t spending as much on housing as other schools, it seems like the rate of students living on campus is increasing.</p>

11

<p>artlovers – I agree, most of my kids’ savings came from food, except they both wound up spending summers in Chicago. There was one summer when one kid sublet his piece of an apartment, and he recovered about half of what he had to pay. Everything taken into account, I thought my kids were about breaking even vs. the dorm when they were paying $600/month, except that they had five times as much space and were much happier, and they didn’t have to move their stuff until after the younger one graduated. (He inherited his sister’s totally wonderful apartment when she and her housemate graduated. She is really, really good at finding apartments.) They saved hundreds of dollars per quarter on food. They could have gone a step (or more) down on the nice-apartment scale and saved money there, too.</p>

<p>Both my kids were very social. They didn’t particularly feel like they needed a “house” to find and maintain friendships. Each of them kept a few, but only a few, friends from his or her original house.</p>

<p>It used to be that only Snell-Hitchcock had any fourth years who chose to live there without coercion. (RAs get free housing, and some merit scholarship winners are required to remain in housing.) I gather, though, that there is some movement for people to stay in South Campus. And a few years ago the university eliminated partial meal plans and changed the rules to make it much harder for dorm-livers to invite off-campus kids to eat on-campus with them. That drove something of a wedge between the two groups. It probably helped the university keep more upperclassmen on campus, but it badly damaged the social fabric of a couple of clubs my kids were involved with.</p>

<p>I could argue it either way. I never wanted to live off campus when I was in college. My future spouse, on the other hand, could only take dorm life for a year. If I had had the option of moving into an apartment like the one my kids had, however, I might well have jumped at it.</p>

12

<p>If you decide to stay for the summer for research or something, do you have to find an apartment? Or do they keep some of the dorms open?</p>

13

<p>You have to find an apartment. If you want a lot of friends, let it be known you are looking to sublet someone’s slot for the summer. (But then you may lose some of them when you let it be known that you don’t intend to cover 100% of their rent and utilities or give them any security deposit.) There are more places available than there are people to take them, but not so many more that you can totally dictate terms. </p>

<p>When my son sublet his spot one summer, I think the terms were full rent, but only for the period occupied (7 weeks), not the whole summer, and my son covered all the utilities. So basically, he got half of his summer cost covered, which was fine, because that meant that he was paying less for the full year than he would have paid for three quarters in a dorm.</p>

<p>They use the dorms for other things during the summer.</p>

14

<p>Just to clarify: there are currently several options for off-campus students to buy meal plans, and they can always pay for a single meal in the dining halls without a plan. The meal plans for students in the dorms include 5 guest swipes per quarter.</p>

<p>[Meal</a> Plan FAQ | UChicago Dining | The University of Chicago](<a href=“http://dining.uchicago.edu/page/meal-plan-faq]Meal”>http://dining.uchicago.edu/page/meal-plan-faq)</p>

15

<p>There are actually two dorm options depending our your age. If you are over 20 (perhaps it is 21) you can stay in I-House, or alternatively, they let you stay with the summer schools students in a campus by the main library. Most students get sublets though as JHS pointed out.</p>

16

<p>DD insisted on off campus living after her 2nd year, I was against it, but I let her try anyway. In a grand scale of things you really do not get much benefit by living off campus. My arguments were:</p>

<ol>
<li>The off campus living will add some commuting time. Although not much.</li>
<li>If saving food money was the main issue, the amount of savings is not much either, if the total cost of full ride is 250k for four years, a 10k saving is not much difference. Ok, lets say each quarter is 10 weeks, even you cook the food, it will still end up cost $100/week or $1000/qtr. a saving of 700$/qtr or around 10K for four years, big deal. We send the kid to college to learn, not to learn supermarket shopping, food preparation or cooking. The time wasted on those activities could be used to socialize, study or any other betterment. If the GPA is affected by living off campus, the 250k investment weigh much more than savings on food.</li>
<li>In order to get better location off campus apartment, you need to search it real early, like March, DD had some roommates issues last year(one of the roommates dropped out at the last moment) and did not look for apartment until May, so the location is a bit off and we worry about her safety.</li>
<li>When you search for apartments late, you get crappy apartments, in addition to bad location. DD ended up with a room without window and heater, there was a skylight nevertheless. When we flew in to help her to move, my wife was not happy with DD’s selection.</li>
<li>Yes, you get larger living quarters, but most of the time students do not study in the dorm. Dorm is for sleeping and take showers. You don’t need all these off campus living hassles such as furnishing, moving and such. We had to rent a van and drove all over Hyde Park to buy Used furniture.</li>
<li>Once you are out of the Dorm, the chances of gaining new friends are much less, as the other poster pointed out, her kid kept only a few friends from the house. </li>
</ol>

<p>All in all, I am the firm believer to stay in the dorm, heck through the four year with good grades, lots of connections and get a better job upon graduation.</p>

17

<p>Um. Yeah, you could stay in the dorms over the summer. It costs ~$1000/mo. A basic sublet will likely fall somewhere in the range of ~$500-600/mo</p>

18

<p>

This is exactly the argument we used to convince our son to stay in the dorm. We also reminded him of the cockroaches he had to deal with in the apartment he stayed last summer. :wink: (It was in one of the nicer looking buildings near 51st & University.)</p>

19

<p>Let’s face it: we have very smart kids that have shown their academic prowess. Two years of dorm life should be enough. Training for successful independent adult life is as important as all the academic learning they are getting. If I had wanted our son not to worry about supermarket shopping, food preparation, cooking, and fumigation he could have lived at home and gone to school right here.</p>

20

<p>By the way, after living in an apartment with 3 roommates for 2 years, S1 graduated in 4 years, with good grades, lots of connections and has had a more than better job since 2 weeks after graduation.</p>