There has been some heated discussion over at home dot cwru about housing options for next year. What many people fail to realize is that it may very well be cheaper for them to live on campus. The bottom line: it depends first and foremost on your financial aid package, and secondly on how many people you plan to live with. If you receive grant-in-aid from Case, and most people do, disregard the generalizations being made over at home dot cwru and read on—it may save you some money.

The idea that living on campus could actually be cheaper seems like a strange one, especially considering the cost of the new North Residential Village apartments. It revolves around the fact that when you move off campus, you lose $5,030 in grant money, provided of course that you actually receive that much grant-in-aid from Case. That's FREE MONEY, it doesn't need to be paid back, and most people I know here receive it.

The cost of a North Residential Village 4-5 bedroom apartment is $6,990 for the upcoming school year (approximately 9 months), plus $400 for the technology fee ($200/semester). If you lose the $5,030 grant (you lose all of it regardless of your meal plan choice), that leaves you with $2,360 ($6,990 + $400 - $5,030) to work with for the school year if you'd like to match the on-campus solution. With a 9-month school year, that means you'd need to find something cheaper than $262 per month (per person). That includes utilities, internet, and any other services you want that are included in the on-campus housing cost. Good luck!

This obviously doesn't justify the high cost of on-campus housing, but since this grant-money constraint isn't exactly something we can work around, it pays to look at your situation before taking those numbers into account. You're much more likely to save money by getting off the meal plan. Even the cheapest meal plan offered next year is $2,200 per year for 7 meals per week. You could quite comfortably survive on 21 meals per week for not much more than that.

Depending on how many people you plan to share an apartment or house with, you may find a situation where it's cheaper to split the cost than to live on campus. It's actually not too hard to find rooms for rent in the $200–$250/month price range; such ads are posted on the home dot cwru classifieds and craigslist all the time. And if you don't receive that grant money from Case, it is obviously cheaper to live off campus regardless.

Also take into consideration which option you would choose if both housing solutions were the same price. To those who would say off-campus: have you seen the new apartments?! Combine their features with included utilities, the network connection, cleaning, and the Village itself and I'd gladly take the North Residential Village over off-campus housing any day.

If you want numbers you can fiddle with, I recommend taking a look at this Excel spreadsheet created by my friend and suitemate, Franz. It allows you to adjust any variable I've mentioned above to find out which housing solution will be cheapest for you. Please note that housing and meal plan are independent, but appear related in the spreadsheet. You can easily change the on-campus meal plan value to match your actual food costs (the default value is not a sufficient meal plan)—more likely, you should enter the same value as 'off-campus food' if you plan to opt out.

Your decisions are clearly none of my business, but hopefully you'll find this helpful and read the fine print!

EDIT: Access logs tell me that this post is making the rounds in the Housing department. If I'm wrong or there's something I'm missing (for example, if the grant-in-aid is likely to be automatically replaced by another form of aid), please post a comment!