many large universities require freshman to live in dormitories on the basis that living on campus leads to better classroom performance and lower drop out incidence
large universities also provide a number of academic services in dormitories such as tutoring and st udent organizations t hat encourage an environment condusive to learn-ing A survey was administered to college to students at a large state school to determine what impact dormitory living has on student performance we use a handful of instru-mental variable strategies to account for the possibly endogenous decision to live on campus we find a robust result across model specifications and estimation techniques that on average living on campus increases GPA by between 0.19 to 0.97 that is the estimate for the degree of improvement to student performance caused by living on campus ranges between one-fifth to one full letter grade