Join the Parents Groups of the universities and ask there. You can also search old posts. Philly is sweet for off-campus living, Chicago kinda the same, whereas NYC and Boston make DC look cheap.

It varies greatly at my DCs school in a large city. Some kids want the fancy private apartment and are paying twice as much as the dorm was. My DC is in a 5 bedroom row home and paying a third of the cost of the dorm.

Mine went to a northern SLAC where a lot of undergrad and grad student group houses were passed down from year to year with students doing the work on behalf of landlords to find the next year’s residents. These were large, nice houses that were used as summer places in the 2 months when students were gone. The nicest ones were never more than $800/student per month plus splitting fuel oil (which could get crazy).

Unfortunately a quick Redfin search shows that those all seem to have been sold during the pandemic and are probably occupied by WFH people or used as full-time 2nd houses. I can’t imagine the crunch and it explains why many schools are frantically building housing.

I would also investigate how much tuition generally increases each year.

No such thing.

Anonymous wrote:we're trying to compare COA over 4 years for several colleges. I know some schools have a housing crunch and can be a lot more expensive junior/senior year than living on campus first two years (on average). And some schools have reverse. Has anyone found a resource with average off campus housing prices?

You are going to need to review campus by campus as the costs really vary greatly by location. Even small towns with LACs, where students could get a house for a song in the wayback years, now suffer from housing shortages. And what is available not necessarily affordable and really not pretty.

it's case by case. U chicago (and chicago in general) is not expensive while Purdue is. It's not always what you'd guess.

Anonymous wrote:You should go in assuming everywhere is expensive off campus. The days of negligible rent in small college towns seem to be long gone. My DC is paying $1033/mon. year round (share of a 3 bedroom house), does not include utilities.

Agreed. When we started to budget college costs I thought dorm room and board were expensive, but realized that it was nice to have a clear idea of what it was going to cost. Unlike the living arrangements after the sophomore year - which are harder to gauge and seem almost double when you factor in no meal plan, no utilities - even if some of this is shared among roommates its not cheap.

You should go in assuming everywhere is expensive off campus. The days of negligible rent in small college towns seem to be long gone. My DC is paying $1033/mon. year round (share of a 3 bedroom house), does not include utilities.

I know when we were looking at some schools we looked at the school's housing website - in some cases if they provide apartment-style housing run by the college so we could get a gauge for cost for those. We also asked the admissions team for details on junior/senior housing - in some cases, they shared with us nearby apartments that many students lived in - we could get estimates that way as well. But as others said its location dependent and we were primarily interested in cost and mechanisms for getting the apartments.

It would be so much better if you named the colleges you (your student) are considering.
It varies so much.

some schools are surprisingly expensive off campus, like U Tennessee

I would think that that is ENTIRELY dependent on the city in which the college is located, and what the type of housing is, how many roommates etc.

I have a student off grounds at UVA and the cost for her to be on grounds is not dramatically different, in fact next year when she lives in a house with 8 others, it will be less than it would be if she were on grounds.

we're trying to compare COA over 4 years for several colleges. I know some schools have a housing crunch and can be a lot more expensive junior/senior year than living on campus first two years (on average). And some schools have reverse. Has anyone found a resource with average off campus housing prices?