Foreign language houses, on-campus residences in which students pledge to speak in their target language, offer valuable opportunities for language and culture learning. Scores of such programs exist at universities across North America (Dewey, Baker, Bown, & Martinsen, 2011), yet little is written about them in the research literature. This…

The higher education community is catching up with the reality that student housing is a major part of the educational offer. By providing the right learning environment and a stimulating and stable social experience, good quality, affordable and well-managed housing can contribute significantly to students' overall educational experience.…

This article examines the experiences of a group of Japanese study abroad students in response to the purposeful replication of a Japanese environment by the New Zealand-based institution where they studied. Data were collected from 12 students via interviews spread over approximately 20 months, and revealed that management provided specifically…

LGBTQ+ students face several challenges and obstacles in college and university residence halls. Prior research shows that living-learning communities can be a space in which students develop a sense of belonging and community, as well as pursue academic success. Using the findings of a qualitative study that explored LGBTQ+ students' experiences…

Previous literature demonstrates the widespread impact of on-campus living for Black college students in terms of a sense of belonging, community building, and campus engagement. In contrast, this study specifically explored within-group differences (e.g., gender identity, sexual orientation, and ability status) in Black undergraduates' housing…

The well-being of college students can be impacted by aspects of the physical environment, especially during key life transitions such as beginning college during a pandemic. This repeated cross-sectional study investigates the influence of a newly constructed living-learning neighborhood on first-year residents' mental well-being, specifically…

Promoting staff well-being has been a challenge for many residence life departments long before the COVID-19 pandemic led to a decrease in the mental well-being of the general population as well as in residence life staff. The stressful work environment and demanding work hours in residence life have been linked to burnout and intentions to leave…

Authors examine how interrogating hegemonic gender roles can enhance recruitment, training, and engagement practices for residence life staff in leadership positions. Under specific focus are issues of gendered expectations of the men as paraprofessional role, dynamics in supervision, recruitment and training of staff, and bystander intervention…

In this study, dormitory room and social group assignment data from a college are used to investigate peer effects on college students' decisions to switch majors. Results reveal strong evidence of such peer effects at both the room and the social group level. Most notably, at the room level, the dense concentration of same-major roommates deters…

Mid-level managers have the difficult task of juggling needs and direction of entry-level staff with the demanding outcomes from their supervisors and senior leadership. To be successful, they must maneuver through demanding expectations from their supervisors while simultaneously garnering buy-in from those they directly supervise in order to…

In the UK, students are more likely to live away from home than students in other countries, which affects the nature of the student experience in profound ways. In this paper, the Oxford historian William Whyte considers why the residential model is so dominant, looks at what it means for students and poses some important questions about the…

Housing and residence life has identified the need and priority to recenter the purprose and role of our work in a post-COVID world. Housing and residence life has not, in the same way, identified the need and priority to critically examine how the systems and models of our work are founded within an oppressive system, steeped in whiteness and…

In Nagaland, a state in India's North-East region, the morung is a tribal institution that serves as an educational portal through which all young men passed as the means of learning their living heritage. Described by anthropological accounts, for a century until the 1950s, as a 'dormitory' for boys and young men, it is in fact much more. It is a…

Conducting informal individual interventions with students is a professional expectation for residence life professionals in higher education who live in campus residence halls. Despite this expectation there is limited understanding about what constitutes an effective individual intervention, especially from the perspective of the person…

Pivoting around two sit-ins at the University of Georgia, this article examines student activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the US South. The first sit-in, at the conclusion of the spring 1968 March for Coed Equality, was part of the effort to overcome parietal rules that significantly restricted women's rights but left men relatively…