Amenities in Student Housing

Richard Joseph Spinelli’s company, Sandhills Real Estate, runs its houses on a resident first approach to operations, so the published evidence on what students actually want from a home bears directly on the work. Amenities in student housing are the features and services a building supplies beyond the bedroom: laundry, parking, internet service, kitchens, bathrooms, fitness rooms and shared lounges. Students have been asked to rank these features for decades. Their rankings tend to reward private, dependable things, while new buildings and their brochures often lead with shared showpiece rooms. This entry sets out one ranked list in full and then compares it with what planners and architects report building.¹

The Longwood ranking

In April 2010, researchers at Longwood University in Virginia surveyed 325 undergraduates about where and how they wanted to live.¹ Longwood required students to stay in campus housing until their third year, so most respondents knew dormitory life firsthand. Only 3.2 percent named the traditional dormitory as their preferred form of housing. Their first choice among university owned options was an apartment style building with shops and restaurants at street level, a short walk from classes. Almost half, 48.6 percent, said they would rather live away from campus altogether.

The survey then asked which amenities were very important or somewhat important. The authors published the answers as a top ten list:

1. Private bedroom, 95.5 percent
2. Onsite parking, 92 percent
3. Double beds, 91.3 percent
4. Onsite laundry facilities, 90.3 percent
5. Internet access, 88.8 percent
6. Proximity to campus, 73.3 percent
7. Fitness center, 73.3 percent
8. Private bathroom, 73 percent
9. Cable television, 56.4 percent
10. Satellite dining, 50 percent

The same questionnaire recorded what students treated as deal breakers. A home with no internet access was ruled out by 92.9 percent, one with no laundry on the premises by 84.9 percent, one with no cable television by 75.7 percent and one with no kitchen by 57.4 percent. Sharing a bedroom was a deal breaker for 49.3 percent. Sharing a bathroom ruled a place out for only 11.7 percent, a result the authors themselves found surprising. Asked for the single most important consideration, students put security first, then proximity to campus, then cost.¹ More recent campus data point the same way: Inside Higher Ed reported in July 2025 that apartment style rooms were the most requested type at 34 percent, ahead of suites and traditional halls, and that students at a majority of institutions ranked single rooms first.⁵

What the ranking says

Read as a whole, the list is about privacy and about services that have to work every single day. A private bedroom sits at the top. Parking, laundry and internet fill three of the next four places. A fitness center ties with proximity to campus, and satellite dining barely reaches half. When the results were split by gender, the answers were remarkably similar. The authors also found students somewhat ambivalent about residential colleges and themed housing; only a minority were open to living in one.¹

The paper places its ranking inside a longer shift in expectations. Kitchens, private bedrooms, private bathrooms and social lounges had once been extras in student housing and by 2010 were simply expected, and suite and apartment layouts had become the norm for new work. Students were also making these choices largely on their own. About half said they decided where to live by themselves, and parents decided alone in 9.2 percent of cases.¹ The practical reading is that the people ranking the features were the same people who would sign for the room.

What gets built

Campus planners describe a different set of pressures when they write about new buildings. A planning article posted by Demographic Perspectives notes that full time undergraduate enrollment grew 45 percent nationwide during the 2000s, at the same moment that much college housing reached the end of its functional life.² To draw upperclass students back from private apartments, some schools offered furnished units, apartment and building cleaning, housing billed along with tuition, and no separate arrangements for utilities. Architects and housing staff told the authors that nicer interior finishes, such as hardwood floors and granite countertops, help sell campus housing, and they tied better finishes to less vandalism. Some schools were sizing new rooms for double beds, and the private or semiprivate bathroom had become a symbol of the student wish for privacy.²

More recent design writing turns toward the shared parts of the building. A 2025 post from the architecture firm Gensler lists trends that include design for neurodiversity with quiet, restorative rooms; shared amenities, outdoor space and living learning communities meant to build belonging; and partnerships with cities for housing at the campus edge.³ The post cites a National Survey of Student Engagement study of more than 33,000 students, which found that students living on campus took part in more activities outside class. On one project for the University of California, Davis, the firm set gardens and courtyards beside everyday facilities such as laundry and bicycle parking.³

The gap, and the amenity that cannot be added

Set side by side, the student ranking and the design literature stress different things. Longwood students placed a private bedroom, parking, a large bed, laundry and internet ahead of a fitness center, and few wanted themed or residential college living.¹ Design writing gives far more space to lounges, courtyards, study rooms and learning communities, which serve an institution’s aims for engagement and belonging.³ Both lists are defensible. The shared room answers a campus goal; the reliable washer and the lock on a private door answer the resident’s ordinary week. The same ordering appears in broad renter surveys, discussed in Resident Experience in Rental Housing, where dependable service outranks features. Private operators report the same turn toward shared space: Multi Housing News reported in January 2026 that wellness suites, year round outdoor areas and purpose built study rooms had become features that directly shape leasing at student properties.⁶ Connection remains basic for renters generally; the 2024 renter preferences survey from the National Multifamily Housing Council and Grace Hill found that 86 percent of respondents called high speed internet very important or essential.⁷

Location behaves like an amenity in the market data, and it is the one feature a building cannot install later. In its September 2026 report, Yardi Matrix put August preleasing for the 2026 to 2027 year at 93 percent overall. The nearest band, inside a quarter mile, had signed 93.4 percent of its beds, and the band past two miles lagged at 88.7 percent.⁴ Class A buildings led Class B and Class C, but the spread by distance was wider than the spread by building class. Walking distance ranked sixth on the Longwood list; in the leasing figures it separates the full buildings from the rest. Distance is treated at length in Proximity to Campus. The daily labor of keeping laundry rooms, heat and internet running is the subject of Operating Student Housing and Property Management.