The House That Gen Z Built: Housing Style and First-Year Student Success Emily Gilley, M.S., Graduate Research Assistant Amber Manning-Ouellette, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Higher Education and Student Affairs Leon McClinton, Jr., Ph.D., Director of Housing and Residential Life Oklahoma State University Residence halls are more than designated buildings and spaces for students to rest or sleep. They are hubs of interaction, engagement, and learning between peers who come from diverse backgrounds and experiences. They play a key role in student academic success, largely due to the extended amount of time students spend in those spaces. Researchers have long found evidence that living on campus has a direct impact on academic success and persistence. The architectural design of living spaces can foster students’ socialization and feelings of community. A study by Brown and colleagues (2019) found that students living in traditional housing, where greater socialization occurs through shared spaces with an entire floor, had higher GPAs than students who lived in apartmentstyle housing that can limit peer-to-peer interactions. In the fall 2019 semester, Oklahoma State University’s (OSU) Department of Housing & Residential Life (HRL) partnered with a graduate-level assessment course to build upon Brown et al.’s (2019) findings; measuring retention rate instead of GPA. This partnership was bolstered by the department and the university’s desire to examine first-to-second-year student retention. Therefore, this article’s intention is to address the complex issue surrounding on-campus living environments and student success among Gen Z students, describing one university’s investigation into housing’s architectural influence on student success. In this piece, we define success as a student achieving both educational goals and life satisfaction through academic self-efficacy, attention to study, and emotional satisfaction with academics (Krumrei-Mancusco et al., 2013). Furthermore, this article will provide recommendations to address housing’s role in student success during the first year of college.
Traditional
Suite
Gen Z and Housing First-year students living on college campuses today have vastly different worldviews, interests, and concerns than generations of students before, considering the unique eras they were raised in— for example, heightened security following September 11th, 2001, the Great Recession (2007-2009), and the emergence of technology, Internet, and smartphones. Therefore, first-year students’ residential expectations largely diverge from the original design of residential spaces in postsecondary education. Older residence halls in use today were architecturally designed to house an influx of students and address overcrowding after World War II. Therefore, they were not initially intended to promote community and co-curricular learning expectations that current students have for educational spaces (Yanni, 2019; Seemiller & Grace, 2015). Through this field of knowledge, OSU explored how housing style might impact their first-year student success.
First-Year Housing Style Assessment Partnering with a graduate-level assessment course and institutional research, the Oklahoma State University Housing & Residential Life (OSUHRL) department was able to examine the interactions between the types of residential living options and student success. At OSU, students can choose from traditional, suite, and apartmentstyle residential options. Student success was examined related to student’s achievement of both academic goals, life satisfaction through academic self-efficacy, attention to study, and emotional satisfaction with academics (Krumrei-Mancusco et al., 2013). We collaborated with the institutional research department to examine overall university retention rates of students (first-
Apartment
Figure 1 Housing configurations at Oklahoma State University. page 7
