Why universities struggle to calibrate their student housing systems

Swick Learning
Nov 1, 2024
7 min read

Updated: Dec 1, 2025

It is easy to assume that, because student housing is a type of student service, the same principles that make other services succeed will be equally effective.

But this almost never works. Why?

Few university functions are as deceptively complex as student housing. It is nowhere near as straightforward as it appears. For a few reasons:

Firstly, most other university services deliver something well defined. There is a scope of what the service includes and, if a student's situation falls outside that scope, then the student is (quite simply) at the wrong service! To be helped, they only need to be connected to another service that would consider them in-scope.

Secondly, other services generally only take three different formats: the student receives information; or they receive some advice or action once they've activated a pre-defined trigger (booked an appointment, received a fail grade, etc); or they jointly receive a combination of these alongside other students at an event.

But housing is different.

It does not have a clear or stable scope, and it takes all three of those formats and more. Further, it has a number of complicating factors which usually prevent the logics of other student services from carrying over. These might be called nuances if they weren't rather obvious truths that tend to be overlooked.

This piece outlines some of those complicating factors, since failure to recognise them is often what derails an institution.

It also explores what it means to calibrate a university housing system in the face of these challenges.

The Complicating Factors

The promise is an environment, not a service

When a university provides housing, what is it actually committing to?

The answers to this question rarely describe a service in the usual sense. They almost always depict a certain type of environment. One that is safe, clean, functional, inclusive, supportive, socially lively, intellectually enriching and well-governed, amongst other things.

This distinction changes everything.

If you promise a quality environment, you are no longer simply accountable for providing rooms, repairs and events — you are accepting the duty of managing, to the extent possible, any threat to the quality of the environment. Anything you are aware of that is likely to render your promise of a certain type of environment untrue cannot be labelled “out of scope.” You cannot defer it until your next four year strategic plan. You take steps to resolve it, as soon as is feasible, because untreated disturbances can compound the harms it causes and erodes trust in your promises.

For instance, if a new recreational drug becomes popular in your community, you are now in the harm minimisation game, whether you wished for it or not. You don't get to choose the boundaries of the work. Your ever-changing residents will exercise that power for you.

The alternative, of course, is to just ignore such disturbances, allow your broken promise stand, and watch the wilful acceptance of avoidable harms and neglected promises be accepted as 'normal' by your culture. Naturally, in this case, you will also be watching your problems multiply!

No, as demanding as it is to respond to the randomness of the work, this is what makes Student Housing and Residential Education (SHARE) such an interesting field to work in. The game keeps changing, and you are tested in new ways. No two years will be the same... and if it feels like they are, what's more likely is you have lost touch with today's young people.

Students have higher expectations of residential services

The fact that student housing is (in most of the world) paid for separately is a pivotal difference.

There is a fundamental difference in the level of expectation that comes with it. And if you've ever asked people to pay out of pocket for something they're used to receiving “for free,” you will know exactly what I mean.

There is a dramatic rise in expectations for services paid for separately from tuition fees. The difference between housing becomes and tuition-integrated services gets greater again when tuition costs are deferred by generous government loans, while housing remains (generally) a singularly large upfront cost.

For residential services to feel worth it, then, the benefits have to hit harder than the costs.

There are readily available substitutes

You can change where you live without changing education provider. Sure, if living on campus was compulsory, and bad enough, a student may change institution. But it is very hard to imagine the same being true for a careers centre, mentoring program, or the library services. It's not like students can swap those out for a private market alternative. Though perhaps more universities should consider this, given how much they dynamic of readily available alternatives can elevates a service!

When there are multiple, easily available substitutes available with have no or low switching costs, students will evaluate the service more consciously. It's hard not to, when you have the opportunity to pursue an alternative every 6 or 12 months. This is a decision that does not exist for most tuition-integrated services.

Housing is more heavily scrutinised, because students can take up a better option without disadvantaging their academic progression or their budget.

It is multi-goal with many component parts.

Student housing is straightforward in concept but delivering it is a complex and fragile undertaking.

The specialised facilities require significant capital investment, often involving debt, donors or investors; and the degree to which they are maintained can save or cost millions more dollars.

Substantial fees are collected from students in return for the service, through an additional legal agreement with them, that transitions the University from being merely an education provider towards something between a landlord and parent (‘in loco parentis’).

This means ensuring student safety – often across diverse communities of 40+ cultures, which are dominated by young people at their peak risk-taking age – while encouraging good health, intellectual exchange, and other forms of personal development.

Together, this is quite a lot of goals to balance.

The highs are higher, and the lows are lower

The way student housing is experienced tends to create a wider spread of journeys and outcomes for students than other services.

Looking to downside risk first, the service is extremely sensitive to failure: breakdowns in equipment, processes, or interactions are not mere inconveniences – in someone's home these will disrupt students’ sleep, safety, nutrition, finances, study time, and overall wellbeing. As many experts say, ‘if home is not going well, university is not going well.’

However, the upside risk can include extremely large and long-term wins: with the right approach, educational residences can elevate students’ entire university experience and significantly shape their lifelong success, lifelong affinity with the university, and ongoing propensity to donate, or support the institution in other ways.

This greater spread of outcomes is also significant factor in staff job satisfaction and retention. Sharing in the highest highs is exhilarating, and enduring the lowest lows takes a toll. Remember to check on your people.

The end users' value drivers are evolving all the time

Students' expectations and priorities shift at different stages of their journey.

For instance:

Prior to arrival, students may focus on tangible factors such as location, cost, amenity and the promise of transactional support.
Once settled, they may come to prioritise social connection and wellbeing support.
In later years, students may value practical resources, like quiet study spaces, access to academic resources, structured programs, or peer networks.
After leaving a residence, it may evolve further. They may attribute the most value to friendships, community connection, exposure to diversity, leadership experiences, and other lifelong benefits.

Recognising these shifting priorities is essential to understanding residential experience. We often encounter providers who are struggling to interpret what seem like confusing and contradictory signals in student feedback, whose samples are from students at different stages of the lifecycle.

Calibrating in the face of such complications

Student housing is less a service and more a system. It is full of interconnected elements, and managing it is loaded with trade-offs.

The most apparent trade-off is student experience versus financial returns. This is not always a direct trade-off, but very often is, especially in the short run.

But there are much subtler ones too. For example, providing an extensive array of academic supports in-residence seems may seem like an unquestionably good thing to provide, but in practice it may come to nurture dependence, and deprive students of the impetus and opportunities to develop resilience and self-management skills.

Every aspect of this very multi-disciplinary service of student housing — such as pricing, facility upkeep, student care, and programming — all face similar calibration challenges. Navigating these is made more perilous again by the systems effects, where so many areas are impacting one another!

If you have never steered one of these ships and had your own hands on the dials, it can be maddening to fathom how all these variables affect each other. And even among those practitioners who have spent a long time on the decks observing cause and effect have usually only done so at a few institutions. Their beliefs can often be over-fitted to their local context, lacking generalisability, and their advice may be innocently misguided.

Our clients often ask us to point them toward a 'good' or 'best practice' model of housing to adopt. Our (initially frustrating) answer is that while there are principles that help you to search for it, the only 'good' model will be the one that's good for your institution, with your students, and your goals, in your unique context.

The key, then, is not to copy what looks good somewhere else, but to understand how you can meet your own goals while minimising painful trade-offs. Ideas and inspiration from elsewhere can accelerate this, but only you can do it.

One thing is for certain: being ignorant of, or insensitive to, these complicating factors, will not make the task of calibrating your housing system any easier.

Ways to make it work

Indeed, here we have established that calibrating a student housing system is difficult and daunting, but you may still be thinking 'but what should I do about it?' Several other resources in this library will go a long way to helping you work through it. But if you prefer that we take you through a guided process of review, strategy development, or forward planning, please get in touch.