My best friend, Michael, and I were recently shopping trying to figure out where we were going to live starting in the fall of next school year. We both spent this last semester on campus fulfilling Georgia Southern's freshman requirements and we would both be quick to agree that it definitely had its pros and cons. Before we started, we sat down and looked at what on-campus and off-campus housing had to offer using a cost/benefit ratio. While living on campus is great in that you can walk to class faster, you are located closer to the dining hall, and you have the ability to go to the library without looking for a parking space ; Due to the financial, social, and personal consequences when it comes to homework and grades, living on campus is an issue that I believe is a significant factor in poor grades. Off-campus housing, due to the wide variety of choices, is able to offer students the freedom they need to be their own person, the ability to hide away in their room when it is time to study or visit one of the many community-provided amenities when they feel like being social, and they provide all of this for a mere fraction of the cost of on-campus housing, even taking into account utilities, food and gas. The implications from a financial perspective are by far the easiest to determine. On-campus housing costs at Georgia Southern University typically range between $2,300 and $3,900 per semester. These prices are all-inclusive in the sense that electricity, water, trash, and even cable and internet are all included in the price and come fully furnished upon move-in; however, when you take into account that on-campus leases only last 4 months, you start to r...... middle of paper ......July 5, 2008. George Fox. April 22, 2014. Georgia Southern University. “University accommodation prices”. 2014. South Georgia. April 22, 2014. Mattioli, Dana. “The pros and cons of living off campus.” The Wall Street Journal (2007). Naidus, Alex. “21 Lessons You Learn Living Off Campus.” Buzzfeed, August 11, 2013. Office of Research and Evaluation. The impact of living on or off campus during the first year. Irvine: University of California, 2007. Seow-Eng Ong, Milena Petrova, and Andrew C. Spieler. “Demand for university student housing: an empirical analysis.” Journal of Housing Research 22.2 (2013): 141-164. Vallient, Paul M. and Patricia Scanlan. “Personality, Living Conditions, and Alcohol Consumption by First-Year University Students.” Social behavior and personality: an international review (1996): 151-156.