Claim: UO Students Living on Campus Achieve Higher Success

Question

As a student at UO, I noticed that the school promotes its upperclassman residence halls by claiming that living on campus directly contributes to academic success. UO's website is a high-quality and valid resource because of the school's status as a nationally recognized research institute. The article sharing this claim also includes five scholarly sources to corroborate their statement. However, one crucial limitation in the article is that the studies conducted to test this statement pertain strictly to "FTFTF" or first-time, full-time freshmen. This aspect makes their advertising biased because they omit that their research does not consider upperclassmen. It is also important to consider that the article does acknowledge the potential issue with these "omitted variables." I believe the claim is backed up with substantial evidence, but the presentation is misleading. What do you think? Is this claim legitimate, given the context?

Answer 1

This is a fantastic factcheck, your research is very thorough. I have seen other sources confirming that living on campus does help students achieve higher success, particularly in areas such as GPA, which makes this a believable claim. However, the majority of these sources also come from Universities, making them potentially biased as living on campus would bring in more money for the schools.

Other sources:

https://www.tompkinscortland.edu/should-i-live-on-campus#:~:text=Potential%20for%20Better%20Academic%20Outcomes&text=According%20to%20research%2C%20the%20answer,than%20their%20off%2Dcampus%20counterparts.

https://www.gcu.edu/blog/gcu-experience/on-campus-vs-off-campus-comparing-academic-success-outcomes

Comments

Hi, I agree on your analysis here. Good job being able to recognize another perspective. I think this research has to be cross-checked.

 I also wanted to add that the sources that UO is pulling from is not relevant. Some of the reference research dates back to 1997 and 2007, making it less credible. I think it's very key to look at the motive that the university wants to push out. It could be possible that they included this study to convince parents and students to invest their money in living on-campus for the university's benefit.

Answer 2

I really enjoyed reading this factchecking and thought you were very knowledgeable on this topic. Like another answer gave, it is hard to say if this is extremely beneficial for students to live on campus as most of the articles about this are from schools. With that, they can easily make more money as it is more costly to live on campus rather than somewhere else. However, the Department of Education did say that there is a positive correlation on students, “They find that living on campus does have an immediate positive effect on academic performance” This demonstrates that this is a valid claim to make.

Sources:

https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1058304.pdf