The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 44, No. 2 - 51

Why Students Move Off Campus

these were collapsed into on campus and off
campus, and the 93 students who said they
would be graduating, transferring/withdrawing, or studying abroad were removed from the
data set.

. . . housing administrators
may have more control than they
realize over retaining students in
campus housing .

Data Analysis
There were three stages of analysis for this
study. First, I divided students who were living
in university housing (including universityowned rentals) into two groups: those who indicated they planned to live in campus housing
the following year and those who reported they
planned to live off campus. A two-tailed, independent samples t-test was used to compare
these two groups to determine which factors
significantly differed in importance between
the two groups.
I also conducted a binomial logistic regression for on-campus residents to determine
which factors best predict whether an individual plans to move off campus the following year.
For this and the following analysis, I narrowed
the scope of on-campus residents to exclude
the handful of respondents in the universityowned houses near campus, whose housing
shares characteristics with both on-campus
and off-campus housing.
Finally, understanding that individuals
cannot always predict their future behavior accurately, I compared students living on campus
to those living off campus on whether they indicated that each factor was one of the three
most important factors in deciding where to
live that year. First-year students were excluded
because they are required to live on campus.
I conducted a chi-square test for each housing
factor to examine the relationship between

current housing situation and the factor's importance when deciding where to live. Respondents were coded as yes or no for whether each
factor was included in their top three most important factors.

RESULTS
Differences in Students Planning to Move
Off Campus Versus Stay On Campus
I conducted a t-test to compare those students
living in campus housing who planned to stay
in campus housing with those who planned
to move off campus. As shown in Table 1,
students planning to stay on campus were
significantly more likely to place importance
on the support of in-residence staff, the ease
of making friends with other students, close
proximity to on-campus events, and university
housing policies. Students planning to move
off campus were significantly more likely
to place importance on ability to cook one's
own meals, ability to live in housing during
summer break, access to a private bathroom,
availability of parking, cost of the housing,
ability to have a single room, ability to live
there during winter break, and ability to live
with family members or friends who are not
students at the same university.

V o l u m e 4 4 , No. 2 * 2 0 1 8

The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 44, No. 2

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