For the past three years, I have been apart of Residence Life as a Resident Assistant and have worked in the dorms. The topics that I have been considering are the impact of Residence Life in the residence halls on campus or how University's have been promoting students to live on campus versus off campus. I think that both these topics would be interesting to learn about and would give me a different perspective of on campus housing at Rutgers University.
Living on campus is definitely an interesting topic. Lots of angles to pursue. For one thing, I have had several students write on the problems with commuting vs living on campus, where they found commuters are definitely at risk of taking longer to get a degree and at greater risk of dropping out than those living on campus. You can find their blogs here:
ReplyDeletehttp://karinagustin.blogspot.com/
http://ashleyshanley.blogspot.com/
http://durandcollege201.blogspot.com/
Those could point you to quite a few resources. The most interesting issue they raised is that students living off campus tend to work more than students living on campus and that tends to shift their focus away from school and toward work, so they take more time to graduate and often drop out and go to work due to immediate concerns (like buying a car). It's as though on campus and off campus are two different "lifestyles" that have different effects on college success. And, obviously, on-campus living is most often chosen by students from more affluent backgrounds, so the on-campus and off-campus divide aligns with social class --though, as Armstrong and Hamilton show, the dorm itself can be a tough environment for those students from even marginally lower class status than their most affluent peers.
There have also been several ethnographies of dorm life, including Paying for the Party but going back to My Freshman Year by Rebekah Nathan (a pseudonym), Coming of Age in NJ by Michael Moffatt, and Educated in Romance by Holland and Eisenhart. That might be an angle and there might be some opportunities for primary research if you go that way.
And there is probably all sorts of research about how to improve residence life. So you could also start by looking at the professional journals in the field.