Michael Jodah spent every day in August telling university students he had no room for them.
“It’s awful,” he said about the experience. “But that’s unfortunately the circumstance.”
Jodah is the co-executive director and co-founder of HOUSE Canada, a non-profit that operates student housing co-ops owned by students’ unions.
Right now, HOUSE operates three buildings near York University that, together, can house 30 students. The spaces fill up quickly, Jodah says, and there are no vacancies. But HOUSE has plans to open housing near other Toronto universities in the future.
HOUSE’s co-ops provide students with affordable housing fewer than 30 minutes from campus — a highly desirable prospect for students strapped for time and money. But new research says off-campus housing is actually associated with reduced academic performance, and points to the importance of creating on-campus housing for students.
“The on-campus environments matter because they provide more than a bed,” said Shelagh McCartney, a professor of urban and regional planning at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) who co-authored the study.
“They provide access to residence programming, study spaces, peer networks, staff support, after-hours academic and social engagement.
“And that is a value.”
Few housing options
There were about 2.3 million post-secondary students enrolled in public Canadian universities and colleges in 2023/24.
Most do not live on their schools’ campuses.
In the new TMU study, researchers examined records of more than 750,000 students at four Toronto universities: Toronto Metropolitan University, York University, University of Toronto and OCAD University. The records, from 2007 to 2018, included information about students’ Grade Point Average (GPA), academic program, demographics and whether they lived on or off campus.
Just over seven per cent of students lived on campus during university, and most who lived on campus did so in their first year of study.
The researchers found that living on campus increased students’ grades by an average of about two grade points.
Conversely, students who spent more than 10 hours a week commuting to and from campus saw the greatest decline. On average, these students’ grades were three percentage points lower than students who spent between one and five hours a week commuting.
That drop in grades could significantly impact students’ academic futures and potential upward mobility, says McCartney. It could, for example, determine whether students are accepted into graduate school.
Students who lived at home with their families were also at an academic disadvantage compared to students who lived on campus, the research says, in part because they are also commuting.
“Although the students may be happier living with their families, they still have the same impact [on their grades] as other students that are commuting,” said McCartney.
Impact of commutes
On-campus students’ stronger academic performance does not seem to be fully explained by avoiding long commutes.
Even students who lived close to campus were at an academic disadvantage, the TMU study says.
“Proximity alone is not fully going to explain the advantage of [living] on campus,” said Kiana Basiri, a professor of real estate management at TMU and one of the report’s co-authors.
“Even after controlling for that commute time, we see that living on campus remained associated with higher grades.”
The researchers say living on campus can improve students’ academic performance by giving them easier access to academic supports, extracurricular activities, and campus resources such as health services.
These living environments and services provide students “an educational advantage that sets them up for success,” said McCartney.
Maryam Zahid, a second-year nursing student at Toronto’s Humber College, spends four hours a day commuting to and from her parents’ home in Ingersoll to the college’s Etobicoke campus.
She says her grades have not suffered from the drives, but she has missed out on the college experience. She spends most of her time at home studying and has little opportunity to socialize.
“You get, like, the FOMO [fear of missing out] of not being able to completely experience the student life,” she said in late August, a couple weeks before classes started.
Financially, though, it is the best decision for her, she says. Zahid estimates she spends between $830 and $1,000 a month on gas. If she lived in Toronto, “the total cost of commuting would just be my rent,” she said.
She does not regret her decision to live at home, but wishes her student experience could be different.
“I think that students should not have to choose between affordable housing and [a] full student experience,” she said. “I think it’s the right for every student to have that full experience of being a student.”
Counting what matters
Carolyn Whitzman, a housing researcher and professor at the University of Toronto, says Canada lacks sufficient data about students’ housing needs.
The lack of federal data is “quite shocking,” she said. This makes it difficult to develop student housing policy, she says.
“Students just fall in this chasm where they don’t even count, and if you aren’t counted, you don’t count,” said Whitzman.
Students are excluded from Statistics Canada’s data on who has affordable housing, which is defined as housing that costs less than 30 per cent of a household’s income. But it does not measure how many students live in unaffordable housing.
“Attending school is considered a transitional phase, and low incomes earned by student households are viewed as being a temporary condition,” the agency’s website says.
For many students, living on campus is out of reach. At Toronto Metropolitan University, for example, the cost of living on campus for one year ranges from $8,986 to $15,145, excluding mandatory meal plans.
Provinces do not fund on-campus housing like they used to, McCartney says. In her view, the best option is for governments to increase funding for new university residences.
The “danger” of the current system is that it restricts the academic advantages of living on-campus to students who can afford it, she says.
Jodah, at HOUSE Canada, agrees more public investment in student housing is needed. But he says student housing does not need to be on campus to be helpful, it just needs to be near campus.
HOUSE’s goal is to create student co-ops within 30 minutes of universities across Canada.
“One of the biggest challenges [for creating student co-ops] is the timeline,” he said. Current students may never see their benefits.
But for Jodah, that is just a reminder of how much investment is needed for student housing.
“This should have been more supported.”
