Housing advantage, hidden curriculum, habitus: students’ past and future housing pathways revisited

ABSTRACT

While past research into young people’s transitions out of the parental home identified a distinct student housing pathway offering an institutionally supported ‘housing advantage’, more recently scholars have pointed to widespread housing precarity among university students, reconceptualising the housing challenges students face as a ‘hidden curriculum’ that reinforces inequalities. Meanwhile, time spent navigating this hidden curriculum in increasingly widespread purpose-built student accommodations (PBSA) has the potential to reshape the student habitus, fostering future preferences for the high-density, privatized urban space PBSA represents. This paper re-examines these notions, drawing on interviews with 27 students in Waterloo, Canada, regarding their past experiences and future expectations of housing. While the interviews reveal a multitude of pathways, concepts of housing advantage and hidden curriculum are not as contradictory as they may appear, with many students benefitting from supports offered by university residences before facing an expensive, discriminatory and predatory rental market. Although students’ experiences normalized high-density living, they did not necessarily supersede long-term preferences for detached home ownership, and access to amenities was more important than private space as such.

KEYWORDS:

• Habitus
• housing pathways
• housing precarity
• purpose-built student accommodation
• studentification
• university

Acknowledgements

This article is an extension of work carried out during my doctorate at the University of Waterloo, completed in 2020. I would therefore like to thank my supervisor, Markus Moos, and committee, Martine August, Pierre Filion and Tara Vinodrai, for their guidance, although they should in no way be held responsible for any errors or omissions herein.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Not including students who live with parents or commute from elsewhere.

2 The exception is Tiffany, who lived at home for the duration of her studies in Waterloo, excluding work terms in Toronto.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Department of Housing and Residences, University of Waterloo; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number: 767-2016-1258].