The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 44, No. 2 - 59

Why Students Move Off Campus

perhaps first-generation college students are
more likely to rate staff support and ability to
pay with a scholarship as important in their
housing decision, and they are therefore less
likely to move off campus. Without this kind of
demographic data, it is not possible to identify
specific groups of students most likely to move
off campus.
A final limitation was the timing of the
survey. The questions relevant to this study
were added to the university's large annual
housing survey in order to capitalize on that
survey's high response rate. The housing
survey is sent out at the end of the first semester, when students have at least a semester's worth of experiences to reflect on, and
this timing allows hall staff to receive the
results and then work over the winter break to
take care of any easy fixes in the hall, allowing students to immediately see the results of
their feedback upon returning in the spring.
Because students do not need to commit to
housing for the following year until February
or March, it was not possible to capture their
actual housing plans, only their intentions. A
survey done immediately after these housing
selections were made, asking which factors
played a role in their decision, might have produced different results.

FUTURE RESEARCH
This study represents only a small piece of
the research needed to better understand why
students choose to live off campus rather than
in university housing. In many ways, these
results are reflective of this specific university's policies and available housing facilities.
Determining more universal themes around
what motivates students to choose off-campus

If housing administrators are
making decisions based on
what they themselves valued
as undergraduates, they may
be missing out on generational
shifts that could be influencing
their students' decisions about
whether to live on campus,
assuming that more movie nights
can retain students who are
actually more concerned with
having their own bathroom.

housing requires other institutions to conduct
similar research. This will allow all housing
administrators to have a richer perspective on,
and take a more nuanced approach in responding to, students' motivations for choosing offcampus housing.
There is also an opportunity to dig down
another layer into students' motivations in
choosing housing. Why do some students
value the support of hall staff more than
others? Why is it important to some students
to have a single room, a private bathroom, and
their own kitchen, while others prefer living
in community with other students? It may
be natural diversity among student temperaments, or, as noted above, there may be demographic factors that influence which housing
factors have the greatest importance for certain

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

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