Should I Live on Campus?
College for Christians - Chapter 19
In the first chapter of this college guide, I suggested you ask why you wanted to go to college. Then when you should start your higher education, in ch. 2.
As part of asking which college you wanted to attend, you probably paid some attention to one more question: where? We don’t go to college in the abstract, after all, but in particular locations: in big cities and small towns; next to lakes and atop hills; in Red States and Blue States; close to home or far from it.
While I grew up in Minnesota and loved it enough to return for my career, not being there was a key criterion for my choice of college. I picked William and Mary not just because Virginia was both less frigid and much closer to the nation’s capital, but because I felt like college was a time to spread my wings and live apart from my family.1
Very likely, location played some role in your college choice. But now that you’ve made that decision, you have to ask another version of the where question: will you live on campus, or off?
Residential or Commuter?
Of on and off campus living, which do you think is the more common choice?
It’s not even close: about 85% of American college students don’t live on campus. According to the most recent study I could find,2 over 55% lived off campus on their own, while nearly 30% lived with their parents — though there’s some evidence that that last number has risen with the price of tuition.
If you’re surprised that only one in six college students live on campus, consider a couple things. First, how much of your vision of college has been shaped by popular culture? When was the last time you saw a TV show or movie about college students that didn’t have them living in dorm rooms?3 That’s not to say that there aren’t advantages to living on campus — I’ll get to them in a moment. But like anything else you haven’t experienced for yourself, your imagined college life can be powerfully shaped by media that may not necessarily give you an accurate set of expectations.
Second, the on vs. off campus number varies dramatically by the type of institution. If you wanted to stay really close to home, you may have opted to start at a community college, where just 1.5% of students live on campus — a tenth of the already small overall number. Conversely, the on campus population is close to a majority at private four-year colleges nationwide, and no doubt much higher among their first- and maybe second-year students.
In fact, it may be that you have no choice. If you’ve decided to spend the first year or two of your higher education at a community college, you probably don’t have a residential option; with no dorms available, you’re almost certainly going to live at home or rent an apartment. Or it may be that saving money is a crucial part of your college decision, and commuting from home is the more affordable option even if you go straight to a four-year school. But if you’ve opted for a private university like the one where I teach, you’ll find the residential experience valued so highly that students are required to live on campus for at least the first year, maybe one or two more.4
“You belong at Bethel—and you belong on campus,” says our Residence Halls webpage, since “our community is unlike any other—it's a place where students find belonging, discover lifelong friendships, and become more authentically themselves.”
These themes were echoed by almost all of the students who answered a survey I created. “You are automatically in community,” said one young woman of living on campus; a male student said it offered “instant community, you feel in touch with your institution because you are living on the campus grounds… with some of your best friends.” Several emphasized that while you get to know people through taking courses, “the breadth and depth of a friendship comes outside of class.” One senior was ready to leave the “Bethel bubble” that’s created by having so much happen with hundreds of students inhabiting one small, lakeside, suburban campus, yet she counted her roommates “some of my best friends for life” and knew she would miss them when she graduated. My wife is still close to her floor mates from her first-year dorm, even as they’ve scattered to different parts of the country.
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In all honesty, I don’t have that lofty a view of residential college life and have always sympathized with my commuter students. Partly because of the building and partly because of the people, my own experience of a freshman dorm was disappointing, and I moved into an off campus apartment as soon as possible. While several of my students emphasized the convenience that comes from having your residence so close to your classes and other activities, I actually appreciated the quiet (and exercise) of my bike commute to and from campus — not to mention the physical reminder that college wasn’t my entire life, even at age 19. I both saved money and learned even more fully how to live on my own, since I had to plan and cook meals, pay utility bills on time, and occasionally deal with a landlord. One of my pro-dorm students acknowledged that a downside to living on campus is that you don’t yet master “another range of life skills that your classes don’t teach you.”
But in retrospect, I know that I missed out on a lot of what college has to offer by spending all my time either in class, in the library, or at my apartment. I didn’t go to sporting events, attend concerts, or join a club, and I missed out on the spontaneous opportunities for doing life together that a couple of my students talked about. If you do decide to live off campus, try to take advantage of campus activities — both those aimed at commuter students and those that give you chances to meet people living on campus. If you’re living off campus because of financial considerations, consider taking a job on campus5 so that you can form relationships while you earn money.
Another of the seniors who answered my survey shared advice that I wish I’d heard at his age: “Even if you are more introverted and might find living on campus to be exhausting, if you want to make build these relationships, you simply have to live on campus.” In the end, I only built a couple of lasting friendships in college. But one was with my first and only dorm mate, who ended up sharing an off campus apartment with me for two years. Whether you live on or off campus, one reason not to live at home while you’re in college is that you learn how to resolve the inevitable interpersonal conflicts that come from sharing a living space with someone beyond your immediate family. In my case, my roommate and I had very different eat/sleep schedules, expectations for tidiness, and views of American politics. But we realized that we shared a faith, a love for baseball, a commitment to learning, and ambitions for further study.
But, of course, resolving conflicts happens in dorms as well. And at a Christian university like Bethel, I suspect that my residential students get to develop a more robust understanding of Christian community than I ever did. Like me, they can quote the Apostle Paul on the unified diversity of the Body of Christ, but they’ve actually had to work through the awkward tensions that come from so many different followers of the same Christ sharing so much of their time and space together. Apart from monks and nuns, I doubt many Christians know the effort and joy of striving to “be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind” (Phi 2:2) as well as Christian college students who share not just classes and chapel services, but dorm rooms (and bathrooms).
“Welcome to Campus. Now Get Off Campus”
But while I’m persuaded that there’s a lot to be said for the residential college experience, I’m going to end this chapter by advising any reader who opts for dorm life to follow advice that my mentor G.W. Carlson used to share during Bethel’s Welcome Week. “Welcome to campus,” he liked to tell our new history and social studies education majors at their department orientation. “Now get off campus!”
A Bethel grad himself who told stories about life on the much-smaller “Old Campus” in St. Paul, GW certainly believed in the value of the residential college — especially how it made closer a community whose members already shared a commitment to Jesus. But as part of walking new students through their educational opportunities, he always made a point of encouraging them to consider off campus study. That could mean going to another part of the Twin Cities — doing community engaged learning in an urban neighborhood — or another part of the country — e.g., studying environmental science near Lake Michigan or singing and songwriting in Nashville. But GW especially wanted to see more of our students study abroad.
I felt the same way, having missed my chance to study in southern France because I decided to finish college in just three years. If they can’t spend an entire semester at Oxford or in the Middle East, we urge our students to take advantage of our January term and spend three weeks traveling with our faculty. GW took students to post-Communist Russia in the late 1990s, and I used to spend “J-term” in European cities and on former battlefields teaching a travel course about World War I. Next January two of my current colleagues will lead a trip to Morocco and Spain to study interreligious dialogue via the history of the Middle Ages, while our science professors go everywhere from the Galapagos Islands to New Zealand.
While I’m happy to lead adult tours of Europe every other summer, there’s nothing like the experience of immersing yourself in another culture during the transitional years of college.6 But don’t just believe me! “I think that it is the best thing that you can do in college,” one Spanish major told me. “It forces you to solve problems on your own, build your own community outside a familiar place, and allows you to learn from a totally new culture.” Likewise, a student-athlete said this about his January travels: “…seeing new parts of the world, different people, and hearing new languages are unique experiences that allows you to have a deeper appreciation for the world around us. There are beautiful cultures that God created around the world that we don't even know about, and we have to seek them out.” More than glorified tourism, study abroad can become what the Christian editor of one book on the subject calls “a place of personal transformation, the point of convergence between an individual’s spiritual development and commitment to global engagement.”7
Once More with Feeling: Get Off Campus
Finally, whether you spent time studying off campus, let me also encourage you to spend non-academic time off campus. If you go to college in a large city, don’t miss chances to explore its rich tapestry of different cultures and cuisines, arts and architectures. If you chose a small town, experience its pace of life. In any kind of setting, pick a cause and spend time volunteering; it’s a good way to temper the self-centeredness that’s a risk of spending several years getting “to know yourself.”
Going to college also gives you a chance to explore the diversity of your own religion, since you can visit churches from traditions other than your own.8 But don’t just flit around — join a congregation whose worship services and other ministries pull you off campus once or twice a week. I believe in the importance of campus ministry, but it’s no replacement for local churches like the one in college where I befriended a music minister who later officiated my wedding and those in grad school where I got to play guitar in praise bands.
If you’re reading this book, you’re a Christian headed to college — which means that you should neither neglect “to meet together, as is the habit of some” (Heb 10:25) nor seek out a faith community composed entirely of fellow college students. By all means, go to chapel, join a dorm Bible study, or attend InterVarsity or Cru events. But whether you live on campus or off, you should also take time away from college to worship and serve with Christians of different ages and educational levels, both sharing your developing gifts with them and learning from their diverse perspectives.
Next chapter: “How Can I Use Technology Well in College?”
The joke was on me. They moved to the other side of the state three months into my first year!
Now, while you’ll see that number being cited by more recent articles (like this one on helping to orient commuters to college), know that it comes from a 2018 analysis. But it had been relatively stable going back to the start of the century, and I’m not aware of any reason to think that it’s moved significantly in the direction of living on-campus.
My favorite TV series while I was in graduate school at Yale was Gilmore Girls, whose character Rory went to college at Yale. Even though she grew up in an idyllic small town in Connecticut and seemed to go home every chance she got, Rory lived on campus in New Haven.
And probably pay for an extensive meal plan, to help ensure that they’re eating well now that they’re not on their families’ dining schedules.
Yet one more higher ed vocab term to master: work-study.
While I didn’t get to do a semester abroad as an undergraduate, I did get to spend three months in England and four months in France doing doctoral research.
Cynthia Toms Smedley, introduction to Transformations at the Edge of the World: Forming Global Christians through the Study Abroad Experience, eds. Ronald J. Morgan and Cynthia Toms Smedley (Abilene Christian University Press, 2010), p. 21.
Several years ago, I added local church guides to the reading packet for Bethel’s Christianity and Western Culture class, so that interested students could find local, contemporary manifestations of the Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Anabaptist, Reformed, Anglican, Wesleyan, and Pietist histories they were learning about.