One former student of mine, Bryan is heading into his second year at UCLA. He has outsized plans: medical school and a Hollywood screenwriting career. Bryan’s mother manages a chain restaurant, and as a result, Bryan is stuck in a tricky middle bracket—not poor enough for awards, but too poor to pay tuition. He is relying on loans and saving money each year by living with his parents—on-campus housing would cost nearly as much as the tuition, he says. Most weekdays, Bryan takes buses from Mid-City to Westwood and back, a journey he estimates sucks two to five hours from each day, depending on traffic, the timing of his trips, and whether he can bum a ride one way.

It doesn’t always start out this way. High school students initially get to know campus life through a collision of rumors, Princeton Review soundbites, and second-hand advice from people too old to recall the experience with clarity. They flip through glossy viewbooks, noting the brick, the tree-lined paths, the pretty models with white-toothed grins clustered in the quad. They imagine themselves shuffling sleepily from dorm to class and their swarm of bright new friends from places they’ve never visited. But when they see their aid packages and crunch a few numbers, they come to a pragmatic conclusion that doesn’t inherently reject the value of living on campus.

Whenever high school students start talking about their commuting plans, many administrators, teachers, and counselors urge them to consider dorm life—at least for the first few years of school. I often heard our school’s founder dub it “the real college experience.” Counselors might explain to skeptical parents how life on campus will improve their children’s emotional health. Teachers worry aloud that students who never live on campus won’t enjoy the same quality of education as their peers, if they manage to graduate at all. Given the debates waged in major publications, I suspect the same kinds of conversations happen at similar schools around the country.

I’ve never been insensitive to my students’ financial situations. Yet I’ve called commuting “a bad idea,” convinced that my students would benefit from easy access to tutoring, study groups, walk-in writing support services, on-campus technology, and professors’ office hours. College, I’ve intoned, is not just about classes, a transcript, and a degree; it's about the people you meet and the time you spend together, the bubbling social stew, the transformative process. In saying all this, I’ve been right, but I’ve also been naïve.

In many ways, dorm living is an experience I would not wish to relive. The room can feel like a cement cell with a bed the width of a diving board. Noise is the norm, from shouted conversations and trampling feet to the disorienting mash-up of the music that’s always booming self-consciously from at least three outposts along the hall. Flings with neighbors are simultaneously freeing and suffocating. Friends knock without regard for the hour. Meet the roommate wearing the wizard robe, the roommate wearing nothing, the roommate with Parmesan feet, and the drunk who observes you studying with a curious squint, as if you were a tenderfoot moseying into the wrong part of town.