<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>