Yale students in Barbados. Michigan students in Brooklyn. Berkeley students in Las Vegas? Off-campus housing is way off-campus now.
As the fall semester begins, many college students will be attending classes from the relative safety of their family homes. Others have arrived to live on university campuses, with varying amounts of success; even schools that enforce strict social distancing guidelines are seeing outbreaks of the coronavirus.
But some students are pursuing a third option: Renting giant houses with friends — sometimes in far-flung locales — and doing school remotely, together. Call it the rise of the college “collab house.”
Two groups of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for example, have rented large houses in Hawaii for the fall semester. Six rising seniors at Columbia University will be living in a house in Portland, Ore. Several rising seniors at Harvard are renting property in Montana. There are at least seven large houses that have been rented in the greater Salt Lake City area alone, filled with students from different colleges.
These houses range in scale from lavish and pricey productions to smart, budget-friendly solutions for first generation, low-income students.
“The reason people my age are really gravitating toward doing this is we all want new experiences, but that’s been hard to come by,” said Erik Boesen, 19, a rising sophomore at Yale who is living in a house in Durango, Colo., with other Yale students.
His reasons for pursuing this off-campus housing alternative are shared by many students living off-campus this semester: They’re looking to escape their families and replicate at least part of the college experience.
“Everyone has been cooped up in their houses,” he said. “We’re all looking to do something that’s a little unique.”
To read the full article, go to New York Times.
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