What? I've been watching movies and series made in USA for decades and didn't know that. I assumed that students living there was a way to save money or the parents wanted it. I had no idea it was required.
If it's in the same city, can students just keep living with their parents?
This has always been the image of college in the United States. The alleged change is that conditions are getting less monastic.
This mandate can relax after freshmen year because at that point you've integrated. You'll take an apartment with some friends in the neighborhood, but you won't really be leaving. The university may no longer be your landlord and your grocer, but your landlord and your grocer will be doing 99% of their business with university-affiliated customers. The neighborhood is still campus, de facto if not de jure. You're still immersed. Technically some students may use this freedom to move across town or back in with their parents, but the mandatory year on campus has brought this risk acceptably low.
When it works, it works well. I have memories from late nights in the library and from Saturday evenings in the theater control booth that I wouldn't trade for anything in the world. But many schools in their search for prestige are trying to force this on kids who don't want it, and on top of that are failing to deliver.
It's a pretty easy requirement to get out of if you know to expect it and are able to plan a bit. Parents in the same city are one option. If you already have a lease, that often suffices. I tested out of a few generals so that I wasn't technically a freshman when I started. Etc. There are loopholes for a lot of situations.
> I assumed that students living there was a way to save money or the parents wanted it. I had no idea it was required.
It shocked me at first too. I've talked to a lot of people trying to get a sense of the other side's perspective, and a large number of parents feel that the "college experience" is so beneficial that they don't feel anyone should be able to make the in-all-cases worse decision to live off campus..... It's a tiny bit similar to the mindset behind worker protections -- some deals are so bad that workers ought not to be able to make them in any circumstances. I don't agree in the slightest that students should be _forced_ to stay in a dorm and whatnot, but people who aren't me feel the opposite pretty strongly.
IMO a lot of oddities in the US university system can be explained (please bear with me) by assuming students are viewed by the larger system not as adults consciously making an investment but as children who need to be cautiously guided into the real world. You don't get to choose to live off campus because you aren't an adult and need to be protected from making the wrong choice. You need to make friends in the dorms because otherwise you won't be socialized for the real world. Teachers assign points for homework because it will give you an incentive to do it (because you're not an adult yet and can't make the right decisions without additional incentives). It's even solidified a bit in our laws and tax code -- financial aid must be available because college is an important part of transitioning into the workforce, and any available aid explicitly assumes you have an amicable relationship with your parents and that they will pay as much as they're able to help you through the last stage of your childhood.
Students live on campus for convenience and/or for socialization/environment - its not to save money, depending on a bunch of factors it's usually possible to live cheaper off campus.
The uni I worked for eventually rolled out that policy after the initial "all freshmen live in dorms now" backlash, but it's a tiny fraction of the student population whose parents live in town. State unis are deliberately located away from the population centers, for obscure reasons involving a mistrust of European politics.
The logic seemed to play out in land grant unis as well, but looking at some history articles about my alma mater, it seems more complicated than "big city bad" -- the big city was on the opposite side of the state boundary river, and on the opposite side of the Slavery issue. Instead as best I can tell, the decision was driven by local legislature party politics of the time, with accusations of voter fraud, vote buying, and bad faith negotiations.
Perhaps the reason most of the state unis I can think of are in small towns is simply that without a crossroads or river confluence driving trade, landowners in those areas were most eager to get a state institution to prop up property values?
One point of university is to make it on your own. If your daddy is rich, this is in the dorms, if not, you rent a basement room nearby and bike in.
Probably because its cheaper to buy lot of land away from population centers.
See: commuter school