What colleges allow freshmen to live off campus?

ucbalumnus
Sun, 25 Jan 2015 01:31:29 +0000

walkinghome:

I’m surprised at how many colleges allow off campus housing for freshman. I bet I visited three dozen colleges with my three kids and I can only think of a couple that allowed that. Our Pennsylvania State U’s (not PSU) allow it for students that live very close, but my experience was that living off campus was more the exception than the norm.

Perhaps it may have to do with whether the college is set up as a commuter school versus a residential school, and whether it is in a location where many students can reasonably commute. For example, the CSU system in California is intended to be commuter-friendly, with admission preferences for local area students, and financial aid policies that make them very inexpensive for low income commuter students. Only a few are predominantly residential, and some of these are in sparsely populated areas where there are relatively few students in reasonable commute range (e.g. San Luis Obispo, Monterey Bay, Humboldt, Chico). Some CSUs do have frosh-live-in-the-dorm requirements, but typically with exemptions for students in commute range and various categories of non-traditional students (older, married, with children, etc.).

Of course, most students at the community colleges are commuters, rather than residential students.