From Enrollment to Housing Demand

The step from a college’s enrollment to the number of rooms its students need nearby is the arithmetic under any student housing company, among them Sandhills Real Estate, which Richard Joseph Spinelli cofounded and which keeps its homes within walking distance of Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus. The conversion runs through a series of links, each of which removes some students from the count or assigns them to a kind of housing. Federal survey data show how undergraduates divide among campus halls, private rentals and family homes.¹ Census rules and a current market report fill in the rest. Each section below covers one link.

The Headcount

The chain starts with enrollment, the number of students registered at an institution in a given term. Two adjustments come first. Part time students are less likely to move for college than full time students, and graduate students often live differently from undergraduates. A campus count of full time undergraduates is therefore the most useful starting figure. Census Bureau data released in 2026 show graduate programs holding only about a fifth of adult college enrollment in 2024.⁶ A table of Fordham figures gives that count for one university, while the entry on the demographic cliff follows the national direction.

Students Who Live With Family

The first large group to leave the chain is students who stay at home. In the federal profile of undergraduates for 1999 to 2000, 24 percent lived with parents or other relatives while enrolled.¹ The share varied sharply by age and dependency. Among undergraduates aged 18 or younger, 44 percent lived with parents; among those aged 19 to 23, the share was about 34 percent.¹ A college drawing mostly from far away loses few students at this link, and a commuter college loses many.

Beds on Campus

The next group sleeps in rooms the institution owns. The same federal profile defines on campus housing as institution owned living quarters, typically residence halls, whether they stand on or off the main grounds.¹ Across all undergraduates, only 16 percent lived in such housing in 1999 to 2000. The figure rose to 37.5 percent at private not for profit four year institutions and to 42.6 percent at private not for profit doctoral universities.¹ The size of this group depends on how many beds a college has and on the rules it uses to fill them, which are the subject of university housing policy.

The Off Campus Remainder

What is left after family homes and campus halls is the group that rents in the private market. Nationally, 60 percent of undergraduates in that federal profile lived off campus and away from family.¹ Among undergraduates aged 19 to 23, the traditional college years, about 44 percent lived off campus on their own, 23 percent on campus and 34 percent with parents.¹ These figures are national averages across very different institutions; any one campus must be measured on its own. The concept of this remaining group, and why it grows or shrinks, is what the market for rooms beyond campus describes.

Housing Built for Students

Among students in the private market, the Census Bureau draws a line that matters for counting demand. The Bureau sorts students by the kind of building. Dormitories, Greek houses the university recognizes, and private complexes put up for students with individual leases all fall under its group quarters count. A student renting a regular apartment or a house fills in the census form together with roommates, as one household.² The Bureau also asks students to report the address they occupy during term, in the town where they study, rather than a parent’s home.²

That distinction splits the off campus remainder in two. Part of it lives in purpose built student buildings; the rest lives in the general housing stock of the surrounding neighborhood, sharing apartments and houses with roommates. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2024 that where campuses such as Clemson lacked dorm space, private developers stepped in, and that windowless rooms in shared apartments had become some of the cheapest options near campus in Austin.⁷

What the Census Counts as Student Housing

The group quarters count gives a national measure of the first part. In the 2020 Census, college and university student housing was the largest type of group quarters, growing by 271,007 people, or 10.7 percent, to 2,792,097 between 2010 and 2020.³ Group quarters as a whole held 2.5 percent of the national population, but the Bureau notes that in some local areas, such as those around a college campus, they can make up a large share of all residents.³ Students in ordinary apartments do not appear in that figure at all, which is one reason census group quarters data understate total student demand near a campus.

Distance From Campus

Once the number of students seeking private housing is known, distance decides where that demand lands. Yardi Matrix’s September 2026 report measured how pre leasing fades with distance. Buildings no farther than 0.25 miles from a campus had pre leased 93.4 percent of their space for the coming year, and the band from 0.25 to 0.5 miles sat at 93.2 percent. Beyond two miles the figure dropped to 88.7 percent, down 110 basis points on a year earlier.⁴ Yardi’s full set of 200 schools hit 93 percent in August.⁴ The pattern is the reason demand near a campus behaves differently from demand across a whole city, and it is explored further in proximity to campus.

Enrollment Change at the Margin

Because the chain starts with enrollment, small changes at the top pass through to the bottom. Yardi reported preliminary fall 2026 figures for 38 of its tracked schools, which together added 6,840 students, a rise of 0.6 percent to 1.1 million, compared with 1.8 percent growth in fall 2025.⁴ A slower rise in enrollment means a slower rise in the number of students entering the private market near those schools, even when campus bed counts stay fixed. The squeeze can also run the other way: the Associated Press reported in 2022 that colleges from California to Florida had turned students away from campus housing, leaving some to sit out a year at home or live in motels or cars.⁸

The Neighborhood at the End of the Chain

The last link is physical. Students who rent privately near a campus live in real blocks, and the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy has documented how that plays out. Colleges often buy land and put up buildings when requests for campus rooms outgrow supply, and many students also seek private housing in nearby neighborhoods that may not be prepared for them.⁵ Neighbors’ concerns commonly include houses converted to student use, shops adapted to student customers, and more traffic, noise and parking pressure.⁵

The report gives Boston as an example: in 2006, 42 percent of the nearly 62,000 students at local colleges lived off campus, and while students had moved into all 20 Boston neighborhoods, slightly more than half were concentrated in four of them.⁵ Concentration of that kind is where the chain ends, with a count of students turned into a count of households on particular streets. How a university and its neighbors manage that result is taken up in town and gown, and the Sandhills page profiles one Bronx company working at that scale.