Our data and methodology

Where the campus figures come from

Every on-campus number on this site comes from IPEDS, the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, collected annually by the National Center for Education Statistics at the US Department of Education. IPEDS data is in the public domain. We use the 2023 release, and we cite it on every page that shows a figure from it. Specifically:

• •Institution name, city, state, ZIP, county and coordinates — from the HD (directory) survey.
• •On-campus bed capacity and the annual room and board charges — from the IC (institutional characteristics) survey, fields ROOMCAP, ROOMAMT and BOARDAMT.
• •Total and undergraduate enrollment — from the DRVEF (derived enrollment) survey.
• •We include active, degree-granting, four-year public and private non-profit institutions in the 50 states and DC.

What we calculate ourselves

Three figures on each campus page are ours, derived from the IPEDS values above. Students without a campus bed is enrollment minus reported bed capacity. The share of students housed is bed capacity divided by enrollment. Equivalent monthly rent is the annual room charge divided by nine, the length of a standard academic year — we divide by nine rather than twelve because most students are not billed for the summer, and we exclude board because a meal plan is not rent.

What these figures do not tell you

IPEDS figures are self-reported by each institution and describe the academic year of the release, so they may differ from what a campus charges today. A small number of institutions report bed capacity that exceeds their enrollment, usually residential colleges or system records covering several campuses; where that happens we do not publish a shortfall. Most importantly, off-campus rents are not in this dataset. They are set by individual landlords, they vary street by street, and no figure on this site should be read as a quoted rent for a place near a campus.

Where the listings come from

Listings are submitted by the landlords and property managers who post them, and the details in a listing are theirs, not ours. We route your inquiry to them; the lease, the deposit, and the terms are agreed directly between you and the landlord.

Language schools

Alongside the universities, the directory includes standalone English language schools certified by SEVP, the US Student and Exchange Visitor Program. These are maintained as a separate, much smaller curated list and carry none of the IPEDS fields above, which is why their pages show no on-campus figures.

How these pages are written

We are open about this: the prose on a campus page is assembled programmatically. Each page draws on a fixed set of human-written and human-reviewed templates, and the dataset above decides which ones a given campus gets. Where a page says most students live off campus, that is because the reported bed capacity for that campus covers under half its student body — not because we assume it. Where we have no capacity figure, the page makes no claim about it. No text is generated on the fly for a visitor, and no page describes a campus we have data for in terms the data does not support.

The pages we choose not to publish

A campus page with no listings, no IPEDS housing figures and a small student body would have nothing on it that another page does not. We mark those pages as not for indexing and leave them out of our sitemap rather than adding them to search results. We also exclude institutions whose students are almost entirely enrolled in distance education, where housing near campus is not a real question.

How BestStudentHousing makes money

The service is free for students, and it is free in the strict sense: there is no fee to search, no fee to be matched, no premium tier, and no payment page anywhere in the student flow. We never collect a deposit — any deposit or rent is paid to your landlord, after you have chosen a place. The platform is funded by the other side of the marketplace: landlords and property managers pay us to receive matched inquiries from students looking near their properties.

Corrections

If a figure on this site is wrong, we want to know. Email our corrections address with the campus and the figure, and we will check it against the source data and correct it.