The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 43, No. 1 - 19

Family Income, Campus Residency, and Student Retention

important was associated with a lower propensity to live on campus, while rating an active
social life and being away from home as very
important were associated with a higher propensity to live on campus.

Table 2
Probit Model Predicting Propensity to Live
On Campus
Predictors

B (SE)

Race
Black

.535*** (.092)

Asian

-.057 (.091)

Other Minority

-.217 (.138)

Hispanic

-.226* (.102)

Female

.070 (.055)

Logged Family Income

.033 (.033)

Parents' Education
Some College

.050 (.086)

Bachelor's Degree

.162 (.093)

Master's or Advanced Degree

.168 (.092)

Native English Speaker

.168 (.093)

High School GPA

.009 (.061)

Total AP courses

.010 (.019)

High School Total Academic Units

.029** (.008)

SAT Score

.001*** (.000)

Public College

-.547*** (.063)

Highly Selective College

.343*** (.067)

Hours per week on

.019*** (.004)

High School Extracurriculars
College Priorities
Living at home during college

-1.313*** (.088)

Active social life at college

.216*** (.060)

Being away from home

.493*** (.059)

during college
Constant
Notes: N=3,110
*p < .05; ** p < .01; *** p < .001

-1.649*** (.441)

Effects of Living on Campus
On average, living on campus produces a 3.1
percentage point increase in the probability of
retention into the second year (predicted probability=.031, SE=.009, p<.01). This effect corresponds to increasing the probability of making
it to the second year of college from .884 (mean
retention of off-campus residents) to .915.
Figure 2 demonstrates variation in the
effects across the income distribution. Panel
A plots the effects across the income distribution, while Panel B illustrates the average effects
within income quartiles, for ease of interpretation. For students from families earning below
$25,000 annually, living on campus is negatively related to persisting into the second year
of college (see Panel A), but the effects are not
statistically different from zero. This subgroup
comprises 17 percent of the sample (60 percent
of whom live on campus). Panel B shows that,
overall, students from the lowest income quartile increase their retention by 1.7 percentage
points, an impact that is also not statistically
different from zero. In other words, living on
campus has negligible impacts on low-income
students. While we may expect the effects to be
even more concentrated among ﬁrst-generation
students, the effect of campus residency among
low-income students is similar across different
levels of parental education, with no signiﬁcant
differences within each income quartile.
The effects increase over the income distribution, with students in the top three-quarters
of the sample's income distribution experiencing positive and statistically signiﬁcant effects.
Students from families in the second income
quartile see a 3.1 percentage point improvement in retention from living on campus,
those in the third quartile see a 3.6 percentage
V O L U M E 4 3 , NO. 1 * 2 0 1 6

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The Journal of College and University Student Housing - Volume 43, No. 1

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