<p>Lots of reasons to move off campus that haven’t been mentioned yet:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Unfortunately, you can’t have your cake (study abroad, typically third year) and eat it too (be guaranteed back into your same house.) If A and B are friends with C, D, and E, and A and B are studying abroad in junior year (plausible- about 40% study abroad) then A and B will want to live with friends when they return and C, D, and E will want to live with them. So there are pushes and pulls that influence students to move off-campus.</p></li>
<li><p>House life can be a great social network for the first year or so, but generally students in my experience grow into their RSO (club) affiliations and academic affiliations. And the more time that is spent in deeper or wider connections than the house. A UChicago “house” is a lot smaller than a Harvard, Yale, or Rice College; it may be in some ways similar to a Smith House but probably shares most in common with an MIT “floor.” In other words, houses are pretty small and it’s possible to outgrow them. And before we over-romanticize the notion of a residential college, consider that not everybody who lives in one of those has a particularly College-y experience, either.</p></li>
<li><p>I feel like the kid in this conversation, so I’ll come out and say it: social life is generally better off-campus. If you want to have your friends over, what are you going to do with them, have them eat your ramen noodles and clean their bowls in the bathroom sink? If you have a kitchen and living room, you can really have people over for a dinner party. Or maybe you want to do something a little more… bigger or less tamed than a dinner party. Hard to do that in a Max double. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>I think it’s important to emphasize that “off-campus” students are really still part of the life of the University, and all of my friends but one felt their quality of life improved when they decided to move off campus, but they did appreciate the dorm experience.</p>