Abstract
Safety nets are typically invisible until tested, and the COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to observe how undergraduates responded to the common challenge of campus closures. Using survey data from two public universities (N = 750), we investigated the factors associated with students’ reports of moving to a parent’s home as a result of the pandemic. Our findings indicate that students’ material needs stemming from loss of housing (if on campus) or employment (if off campus) significantly affected but did not fully explain their housing decisions. Beyond these factors, older students and those living with a romantic partner, sibling, or extended family member were less likely to move in with a parent. These findings build on research documenting class-based differences by demonstrating the importance of life stage and other social ties. Moreover, they highlight how parent-child relationships evolve during the transition to adulthood, influencing decisions to seek support in times of crisis.
Keywords
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted U.S. higher education, ushering in a wave of campus closures in March 2020 that led to many—but not all—undergraduates returning to their parents’ homes. Despite much media attention (e.g., Casey 2020; Hsu 2020) and emerging research on college students’ experiences of the pandemic (Gillis et al. 2023; Jack 2024; Sanchez, Lamont, and Zilberstein 2022; van Stee 2023a, 2023b), the factors influencing students’ varied pandemic housing transitions are not well understood. Previous studies portray coresidence with parents as a private “safety net” for young adults (Newman 2012; Swartz et al. 2011). Yet many college students did not return to a parent’s home during the pandemic, raising the question of who drew on this source of support and who did not.
We use survey data from undergraduates attending two regional public universities in the United States to describe and understand students’ pandemic housing transitions. We focus on coresidence with parents, seeking to understand the conditions affecting whether students reported moving to a parent’s home between March 2020 and March 2021 as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, we aim to offer broader insight into the material and cultural factors influencing young adults’ activation of support from parents (Mazelis and Mykyta 2011, 2020; Napolitano, Furstenberg, and Fingerman 2021; South and Lei 2015). Safety nets are typically invisible until tested (Mazelis and Mykyta 2020), and the recent pandemic provides a novel opportunity to observe how college students with different personal and family characteristics responded to the common challenge of campus closures.
Our analysis is informed by the life course perspective (Elder 1994). This theoretical tradition highlights how intergenerational support evolves as children transition into adulthood, influenced by factors including the child’s age and major life transitions, such as entering a cohabiting relationship or marriage (Min et al. 2022; Settersten 1998; Siennick 2011; Swartz et al. 2011; Zhang and Grant 2023). Early studies on the impacts of COVID-19 campus closures have focused on class-based differences in undergraduates’ material dependence on parents during the pandemic (Gillis et al. 2023; van Stee 2023a, 2023b) without considering how expectations for parental support may also evolve within families throughout the transition to adulthood. Addressing this gap, our study investigates how age and relationship status may have influenced whether undergraduates sought housing support from their parents during this crisis.
The oversight in previous research on the pandemic may stem from a focus on selective research universities whose students are primarily “traditional” undergraduates—below the age of 24 and not in cohabiting partnerships (Choy 2002; Deil-Amen 2015; van Stee 2022). 1 Our research sites, two regional public universities, offer an ideal case for examining variation across life stages because both institutions included a substantial share of “nontraditional” students, defined by their age (above 24) or relationship status (cohabiting with a romantic partner). If prepandemic trends persisted, we would expect to see lower rates of returning home among these nontraditional students, who might be considered more “adult” by conventional American standards (South and Lei 2015; Swartz et al. 2011). Yet, the heightened material need and uncertainty introduced by the pandemic may have disrupted these social norms, producing unexpected patterns of intergenerational support.
Our findings aligned with the expectation that prepandemic norms related to residential independence would persist. We found that housing loss (among students living on campus) and job loss (among students living off campus) significantly affected but did not fully explain the activation of housing support from parents. After controlling for these indicators of material need, older off-campus students and those in cohabiting partnerships were less likely to report moving in with a parent due to the pandemic. Living off campus with a sibling or extended family member also reduced the likelihood of a return to the parental home, which suggests that these relatives, like romantic partners, may have provided an alternative safety net for some undergraduates. These findings build on past research highlighting class-based differences in undergraduates’ material reliance on parents during the pandemic by demonstrating the importance of life stage and relationships with other close social ties.
As the growing sociological literature on COVID-19 demonstrates (e.g., Hummer 2023; Lei and South 2023; McElroy, Perry, and Grubbs 2023; Reed et al. 2023), the large-scale disruptions of the recent pandemic offer a valuable opportunity to examine sociocultural persistence and change during an “unsettled” period (Swidler 1986). Our study contributes to this literature by demonstrating the persistence of preexisting social norms related to residential independence, even amid significant economic and social disruptions. It also illuminates the role of romantic partners, siblings, and extended family members, suggesting that these close ties may have served as alternative sources of support for some college students. Beyond deepening our understanding of this specific historical event, the findings offer broader insight into the conditions under which individuals activate support from kin (Mazelis and Mykyta 2011, 2020; O’Brien, Hayes, and Kiviat 2022), highlighting the role of life course transitions and evolving parent-child role expectations in shaping these decisions.
Background
Coresidence as a Private Safety Net for Young Adults
Parents often provide support to their young adult children; coresidence is one manifestation of this private safety net (Newman 2012; South and Lei 2015; Swartz et al. 2011). The share of Americans ages 18 to 29 living with parents has been steadily increasing since the 1960s, after a low point in the post–World War II era (Fry, Passel, and Cohn 2020; Mazurik, Knudson, and Tanaka 2020). In the early months of the COVID-19 public health emergency in the United States, this figure reached a new recorded peak: 52 percent (Fry et al. 2020; Lei and South 2023). Although many young adults continue to aspire to traditional markers of adult status, including residential independence (Vespa 2017), structural conditions—such as high housing costs and student loan debt—frustrate efforts toward achieving this milestone (Furstenberg and Kennedy 2016; Kuperberg and Mazelis 2023). Coresidence with parents can help young adults save money by reducing or eliminating housing expenses, thereby both delaying and facilitating residential independence (Aquilino 2006; Mazelis and Kuperberg 2022).
Kin Tie Activation: Role Expectations and Life Course Transitions
Culturally defined role expectations govern support exchanged between family members, including housing support. For instance, what a parent is expected to provide for a child differs from what the child is expected to provide for a parent, which again differs from what each is expected to provide for other relatives (O’Brien et al. 2022). Role expectations vary across cultural contexts (Holdsworth 2004; Newman 2012) and over the life course as individuals transition through life stages (Elder 1994; Min et al. 2022; Settersten 1998). Illustrating this, rates of coresidence with parents and financial support from parents in the United States decline as children grow older (Hartnett et al. 2013; Johnson and Ridgeway 2023; South and Lei 2015; U.S. Census Bureau 2022) and enter cohabitation or marriage (Kuperberg 2023; Siennick 2011; Swartz et al. 2011). Yet college is a transitional period that can generate ambiguity regarding parental responsibilities, particularly for nontraditional undergraduates who may have already assumed other adult social roles. The unprecedented crisis of the pandemic may have amplified this uncertainty, generating tensions for students and their families.
Family members have varying levels of resources, including money, time, and space. Concerns about parents’ limited resources may deter young adult children from seeking assistance (Mazelis and Kuperberg 2022; van Stee 2023a, 2023b), and a parent may refuse a child’s request for help because they genuinely believe they cannot provide it. Yet scholars argue that resource availability is itself subjectively constructed because what is viewed as “possible” varies across situations (McNeill and Pierotti, 2023). Factors including the specific nature of the request, the child’s access to and feelings about alternative forms of support, and broader cultural understandings of need, deservingness, and relational obligations are all likely to influence this perception (Kuperberg 2023; McNeill and Pierotti 2023; Wherry 2016). Therefore, two students facing similar barriers to moving home during the pandemic may have evaluated the feasibility of overcoming these challenges differently (van Stee 2023a, 2023b).
Adult children’s age and life transitions, including cohabitation, marriage, parenthood, and divorce, can influence parents’ perceptions of their needs and deservingness, shaping determinations of the appropriate level of support (Kuperberg 2023; Min et al. 2022; Seltzer, Lau, and Bianchi 2012). Students in cohabiting partnerships have a new intimate relationship that may serve as a source of support, and they may expect to (and be expected to) turn to their partner before their parents in times of need, especially if the couple is married (Sarkisian 2006; Sarkisian and Gerstel 2008). The nuclear family persists as a cultural ideal in the United States, reinforcing the belief that union formation signifies successful “launching” into adulthood and, consequently, a point of separation from one’s family of origin (Brooks 2020; Furstenberg et al. 2020; Smith 1993). Illustrating this, a recent vignette experiment found that U.S. adults were more likely to evaluate a hypothetical parent-child coresidence arrangement as a “good idea” if the adult child described was single rather than cohabiting or married (Seltzer et al. 2012). The expectation for adult children to establish a separate, self-sufficient family unit with their romantic partner may deter cohabiting and married young adults from seeking assistance from their parents, including housing support (Sarkisian 2006; Sarkisian and Gerstel 2008; Swartz et al. 2011). Relatedly, a desire for privacy may discourage young couples from moving in with one partner’s parents (Smits, Van Gaalen, and Mulder 2010).
In the United States, independence and self-sufficiency are widely regarded as indicators of moral worth and adult status (Mazelis 2017; Mazelis and Mykyta 2020; Sherman 2017; van Stee 2024). Consequently, even when a parent is willing and able to provide assistance, feelings of shame or embarrassment may deter young adults from seeking help or lead them to decline help when it is offered to them (Mazelis and Mykyta 2020; van Stee 2024). Young adults and their parents alike may stigmatize coresidence as a “failure to launch” (McConville 2020), especially if the arrangement lacks a clear end date or the young adult is not demonstrating measurable progress toward future independence (Newman 2012). Nevertheless, even an arrangement viewed as less than ideal may be seen as the best (or perhaps only) option under challenging circumstances.
Overall, prepandemic research demonstrates that the role of the parental home as a safety net diminishes as children grow older and as they establish new relationships with romantic partners, who may serve as an alternative source of support in times of need (Hartnett et al. 2013; Kuperberg 2023; Swartz et al. 2011; U.S. Census Bureau 2022). Thus, if prepandemic trends persisted, we would expect to see lower rates of returning home among students who were more adult by one or both of these measures. Yet the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic may have disrupted these patterns. Factors that would have deterred older and/or cohabiting students from moving in with a parent under “normal” circumstances may have been disregarded in the face of pressing material needs, and a return to the parental home during the emergency of the pandemic may not have violated expectations of adulthood to the same degree as a return home in normal times. Our study investigates these possibilities.
Other Factors Likely to Influence Returns to the Parental Home
Parent-child relationship dynamics
Returns to the parental home may also be associated with differences in parent-child relationship dynamics, including financial (in)dependence, emotional closeness, and students’ feelings about asking their parents for money (Kuperberg 2023; South and Lei 2015; van Stee 2023b). South and Lei (2015) found that reported emotional closeness to one’s mother was positively associated with young adults’ odds of returning to the parental home after a period of living independently. Kuperberg (2023) found that undergraduates who reported having a close relationship with their parents were more likely to have received financial support for college expenses, whereas those who expressed discomfort in asking their parents for money were less likely to have received such assistance (although the direction of the relationship is unclear and may be bidirectional). It is possible that similar patterns apply to housing support, so we included measures of these relationship dynamics to account for their potential influence on students’ likelihood of returning to the parental home during the pandemic.
Nonparental kin ties
Access to nonparental sources of family support may also have influenced students’ pandemic housing decisions. In our sample, a small share of students living outside the parental home in February 2020 reported living with another relative: 5 percent with a sibling and 3 percent with an extended family member. Past research demonstrates that nonparental kin ties, including sibling and extended family relationships, are important sources of emotional and material support for some youth and young adults, especially when parental support is unavailable (Reczek, Stacey, and Dunston 2022; Robinson, Stone, and Webb 2023; Voorpostel and Blieszner 2008). Furthermore, expectations for solidarity and support may be stronger between coresident relatives compared to relationships between other roommates (Bengtson 2001; Eriksen and Gerstel 2002). Thus, support from coresident relatives may have reduced the need for parental housing support.
Conversely, sibling relationships may more closely resemble friendships than other kin ties, and siblings living together may have returned to the parental home in response to pandemic disruptions. Because so few students reported living with a sibling or extended family member, we focus on interpreting the results related to age and romantic partners and devote less attention to these arrangements. Nevertheless, we included these measures in our analysis because they are theoretically relevant to understanding the role of other close social ties as alternative sources of support.
Social location: social class, family structure, race/ethnicity, and gender
Past research suggests that social class, family structure, race/ethnicity, and gender may be associated with different rates of moving in with a parent during the pandemic. First, recent qualitative research on the pandemic housing transitions of U.S. undergraduates has highlighted social class divides and suggests that returning to the parental home may have been more common among students from privileged class backgrounds (Gillis et al. 2023; van Stee 2023a, 2023b). In a study examining the pandemic housing transitions of undergraduates at an elite private university, van Stee contrasted the “precarious autonomy” exhibited by lower-class undergraduates against the “privileged dependence” of their upper-middle-class peers (van Stee 2023a, 2023b). The study argued that resource availability, although important, was not the sole mechanism driving upper-middle-class students’ greater dependence on their parents. Rather, “the factors students weighed when deciding where to live and how to interact with their families also reflected different expectations for their parents’ roles at this stage of their lives” (van Stee 2023a:17). These findings highlight the importance of culturally defined role expectations, in addition to resource availability, in shaping undergraduates’ responses to COVID-19 campus closings, identifying social class as a key factor influencing undergraduates’ expectations for material reliance on their parents. We measured parental class background using parental educational attainment and a variable indicating whether a parent helped pay for the child’s college expenses, recognizing that the latter reflects cultural expectations and relationship dynamics in addition to resource availability (Bandelj and Grigoryeva 2021; Goyette, Jin, and Xie 2024; Zaloom 2019).
Second, prepandemic research shows a negative relationship between parental divorce (and/or remarriage) and parent/young adult coresidence (Aquilino 1990; South and Lei 2015), which suggests that returning home may have been more common among students whose parents were married to each other at the onset of the pandemic. Parental marital dissolution can strain parent-child relationships, and the presence of a parent’s new partner may have made a return home less appealing for some students (Booth and Amato 1994, 2001; Kalmijn 2013; South and Lei 2015). Additionally, parents who had pooled resources may have been better positioned to support an additional person living in the home (López Turley and Desmond 2011; Tach and Eads 2015; Widra and Luduvice 2021). Marriage is also increasingly related to social class, with those from higher class backgrounds more likely to marry and those with fewer resources increasingly likely to form alternative relationships, such as cohabitation (Cherlin 2020).
Third, returns home may reflect racial economic disparities and cultural differences in social norms related to coresidence and kin support (Cepa and Kao 2019; Gerstel 2011; Ho and Park 2019; Lanuza 2020). White young adults (18–29) are less likely to live with their parents than Asian, Black, and Hispanic peers (Fry et al. 2020), and a recent Pew Research Center study found that a greater share of White Americans expressed a negative view about increasing rates of coresidence than respondents from other racial/ethnic groups (Fadeyi and Horowitz 2022). 2 Immigration plays a significant role in shaping these patterns. Immigrant families may carry stronger norms of familism from their countries of origin and may depend more heavily on family support to navigate the challenges of the immigration experience (Ho and Park 2019; Lanuza 2020; Van Hook and Glick 2007). Yet the pandemic appears to have narrowed racial/ethnic gaps in coresidence to some extent given that the increase in young adult returns to the parental home during this period was disproportionately driven by White young adults (Fry et al. 2020; Lei and South 2023). It remains unclear whether this trend, observed among young adults in general, holds for the more specific population of undergraduates.
Unfortunately, data limitations prevent us from differentiating between children of immigrants and international students, who experienced unique challenges related to visa policies and travel restrictions (Mbous, Mohamed, and Rudisill 2024). Therefore, we included variables indicating race/ethnicity and whether the student grew up outside of the United States (versus in-state or out-of-state), but we do not focus on interpreting these variables.
Lastly, we account for gender because past studies show gender differences in overall rates of young adult coresidence with parents (Swartz et al. 2011; U.S. Census Bureau 2022), parental financial support (Johnson and Ridgeway 2023), and relational dynamics within the parental home (Allison 2016; Sassler, Ciambrone, and Benway 2008). Additionally, transgender and nonbinary students may have faced unique barriers to moving in with a parent related to their gender identity, such as not being out to their parents or having previously experienced parental rejection (Catalpa and McGuire 2018; Schmitz, Robinson, and Sanchez 2020).
The Present Study
Despite the growing body of research on college students’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g., Hall and Zygmunt 2021; Sanchez et al. 2022; van Stee 2023b), we have a limited understanding of the factors influencing college students’ varied pandemic housing transitions. Although the closure of university housing undoubtedly played a role, it could not have been the sole factor determining students’ housing trajectories: Studies describe students living in dorms who did not move back to a parent’s home and students living off campus who did move home (Gillis et al. 2023; van Stee 2023b). Understanding who drew on this private safety net—and who did not—can provide valuable insights into the conditions shaping whether young adults activate support from their parents during times of crisis (Mazelis and Mykyta 2011, 2020; O’Brien et al. 2022; van Stee 2023b).
Although existing studies based at selective research universities underscore the role of social class in shaping students’ expectations for parental support during the pandemic, they do not consider how life stage or access to support from other close social ties may have influenced students’ decisions. Addressing these issues, our study seeks to answer two research questions—the first, descriptive and the second, explanatory. First, which students reported returning to a parent’s home between March 2020 and March 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic? Second, what explains their different choices?
Informed by the life course perspective (Elder 1994), we aim to contribute to a broader theoretical understanding of how life course transitions and evolving parent-child role expectations shape decisions to seek parental support during periods of crisis.
Data and Methods
We collected surveys from undergraduates at two regional public universities in March 2021. After obtaining institutional review board approval, we emailed a survey to (1) a random sample of 5,000 undergraduate students at a university in the southeast (SE) United States (26.3 percent response rate) and (2) all 5,027 undergraduates enrolled at a university in the northeast (NE) United States (19.0 percent response rate). We incentivized participation with Amazon gift cards.
We compared survey respondents to institutional data on gender and race/ethnicity using one-sample t tests to assess response bias. Women were significantly overrepresented among survey respondents, which is typical in survey research (Groves 2006): 76 percent of SE students and 75 percent of NE students in our sample were female, compared to 65 percent and 61.5 percent, respectively, in institutional data. There were no significant differences in percentage of White, Black, Hispanic/Latina/o/x, or Asian students between institutional data and survey respondents in the SE school, but at the NE school, Hispanic/Latina/o/x students were underrepresented among survey takers (17 percent of survey respondents, 20 percent in institutional data), and Asian students were overrepresented (17 percent of survey respondents, 12 percent in institutional data). After removing students who started attending their current institution in the summer of 2020 or later and those missing data on the variables used in our analysis (details in the following), our total sample size was 1,212, including 750 students who were not already living with their parents before the onset of the pandemic. This latter group is the focus of our analyses.
Research Sites
Both research sites are regional public universities that enroll primarily local populations of racially and socioeconomically diverse students, including many who would be considered nontraditional undergraduates due to their age and/or relationship status. The demographic composition of these schools presents an ideal case for investigating how these characteristics may have influenced returns to the parental home during the pandemic. Among the 750 students in our sample living outside the parental home in February 2020, 30 percent were 24 years old or older and 22 percent lived with a romantic partner. The majority of these nontraditional students lived off campus at the onset of the pandemic.
In March 2020, both institutions transitioned to remote classes and instructed residential undergraduates to leave campus, although each school permitted a small share of students to stay in the dorms. The SE university indicated that this arrangement was intended for students “who do not have any practical alternative,” emphasizing that “our strong preference is for students to return home if at all possible, rather than moving into off-campus housing in groups.” Students who wanted to remain on campus could apply for an exemption by submitting a Google form. Similarly, the NE university described the option to stay on campus as reserved for “students whose only home is the residence hall, are housing insecure, [or] reside outside the U.S. or outside of the Northeast United States.” Students could email the housing office to request an exemption, and they were informed that “accommodations would be reviewed and determined on an individual basis.”
Both institutions maintained virtual instruction throughout the remainder of the Spring 2020 semester. The NE school’s courses remained almost exclusively online throughout the 2020–2021 academic year. The SE school offered more in-person courses, although many remained online or were offered in a hybrid format.
Measures
Moving home due to COVID-19 and prepandemic housing
To determine who moved in with their parents, we examined answers to the question, “Have you experienced any of the following as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic?” focusing on the response, “I moved back in with my parents.”
To determine prepandemic housing situations, we examined responses to the questions, “Where did you live in February 2020?” and “Who did you live with in February 2020?” We coded as living with parents in February 2020 those who reported living off campus with their mother, father, or “my stepparent or my parent’s live-in partner.” Although we present descriptive statistics for this group in Table 1, our analyses focus on the smaller group of 750 students who were not already living with their parents before the onset of the pandemic.
Descriptive Statistics by February 2020 Housing.
We divided the remaining students into those living on campus in February 2020 and those living in an off-campus apartment or house but not with their parents in February 2020. We excluded 2 students who reported living in a fraternity or sorority, 11 who reported that they did not have a regular place to live, 4 who provided text responses that did not fit into any of our analytic categories, and 4 who indicated “other” living arrangements but did not specify further. The heterogeneity and limited number of cases within this group leave these students’ circumstances outside the scope of this study.
Independent variables
We examined family and student characteristics likely to influence students’ pandemic housing options and decisions, informed by recent research on undergraduates’ pandemic housing transitions (Gillis et al. 2023; van Stee 2023a, 2023b) and prepandemic research on kin support and coresidence (Kuperberg 2023; Mazelis and Mykyta 2011, 2020; South and Lei 2015; Voorpostel and Blieszner 2008). These include measures of family background (parental educational attainment and whether the students’ parents were married to each other), student characteristics (whether the student had experienced job or wage loss as a result of the pandemic; age; whether they were living with a romantic partner, sibling, or extended family member in February 2020; gender; race/ethnicity; and whether they were raised in state, out of state, or outside the United States), and parent-child relationship dynamics (whether the student was financially dependent on their parent(s) for educational expenses, students’ self-reported emotional closeness with parents, and students’ sentiments about asking parents for money).
Family background
We did not ask students to report their parents’ incomes because students may not possess this information. Instead, we included the following two measures of family background: parental educational attainment and whether the student’s parents were married to each other at the time of the survey (Aquilino 1990; Gillis et al. 2023; South and Lei 2015; van Stee 2023b).
We used parental educational attainment as a measure of family social class. We determined parental educational attainment based on responses to the question, “What is the highest level of education of the following people?”: “Your mother” and “Your father.” We combined responses to indicate whether the highest level obtained by either parent was (a) less than a high school degree, (b) high school degree or equivalency diploma (GED), (c) some college or technical or associate’s degree, (d) bachelor’s degree or postbachelor’s certificate, or (e) graduate degree.
Our second family background variable indicates whether the student’s parents were married at the time of the survey. We assessed whether the student’s parents were married using responses to the question, “What is the current relationship status of your biological or adoptive parents?” We treated those whose parents were “married” as one category and those whose parents were “married and separated,” “divorced,” “never married and currently separated,” “never married and currently living together,” “never married and never in a relationship,” “one is deceased,” or “both are deceased” as a second category.
Student characteristics
Student characteristics included whether the student had experienced job or wage loss due to the pandemic; age; whether they were living with a romantic partner, sibling, or extended family in February 2020; gender; race/ethnicity; and whether they grew up in state, out of state, or outside the United States (Caputo and Cagney 2023; Lei and South 2023; Smits et al. 2010; South and Lei 2015).
Students were asked multiple questions under the prompt, “Have you experienced any of the following as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic?” We included a measure of whether students experienced job or wage loss as a result of the pandemic, which combined affirmative responses to the options “I lost my job and found a new job,” “I lost my job and did not find a new job,” “I was not able to work as many hours at my job as I used to be able to work,” “I was paid less at my job,” and “I was temporarily laid off or furloughed but later went back to work.”
To examine the role of nonparental sources of support, we created three separate dichotomous variables indicating whether the student lived with (a) a romantic partner, (b) a sibling, or (c) an extended family member in February 2020. We used separate variables for each living arrangement (rather than a single categorical variable) because these options are not mutually exclusive. We asked students, “Who did you live with in February 2020?” We coded those who reported living with “a romantic partner or spouse” and/or “my romantic partner or spouse’s parents” as living with a romantic partner in February 2020. We coded those who reported living with “my sister or brother or half/step siblings” as living with a sibling in February 2020 and those who reported living with “extended family (grandparents, cousins, nieces and nephews, etc.)” as living with extended family in February 2020.
Gender was divided into cisgender women, cisgender men, and other responses (including genderqueer, intersex, and other responses).
Race/ethnicity, representing respondents’ self-identification as members of socially constructed racial groups (Roth, van Stee, and Regla-Vargas 2023), was based on the question “What is your race/ethnicity? (Select all that apply).” Responses were divided into the categories White only or White and Middle Eastern, Black only, Hispanic/Latina/o/x, Asian American or Asian only, or other race, which included those who responded they were Middle Eastern but not White, Native American or Pacific Island, or “other” and those who reported they were a mix of two or more races (other than Hispanic/Latina/o/x).
Students were asked, “Where did you grow up?” We categorized responses as raised in the same state as the school they were attending, raised in another U.S. state, and raised outside the United States.
Parent-child relationship dynamics
Finally, we included three measures of parent-child relationship dynamics: financial dependence on parents for educational expenses, parent-child emotional closeness, and sentiments about asking parents for money (Kuperberg 2023; South and Lei 2015). When interpreting these measures, it is important to note that our survey took place in March 2021, a year after the initial campus closures. Thus, perceived closeness and sentiments about asking for money may reflect students’ interactions with parents during the pandemic (see the online Supplemental Material for additional models excluding these variables).
To gain further insight into family financial resources and relationships, we included a variable indicating whether the student received financial assistance from their parent(s) for educational expenses. In addition to capturing resource availability, this variable signals a broader trend of the student’s material reliance on their parent(s) during college, offering insight into parent-child relationship dynamics (Bandelj and Grigoryeva 2021; Goyette et al. 2024; van Stee 2023b; Zaloom 2019). The survey question asked, “How do you pay for your tuition and other educational expenses (like textbooks)?” and offered a list of options including parents, other family members, and various types of scholarships, grants, and loans. We simplified responses into a dichotomous variable indicating whether the student listed “my parent(s)” as a source of financial assistance for educational expenses or not.
We measured how emotionally close the students felt to their parents by asking them to rate the statement, “Have a close relationship with my parents” on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 represents “very inaccurate,” 3 represents “neither accurate nor inaccurate,” and 5 represents “very accurate.”
We assessed students’ sentiments about asking parents for money by asking them to rate the statement, “Don’t like asking my parents for money” on the same scale.
To retain the substantial number of respondents who missed one or more of these three questions but were not missing data on other variables used in our analysis, we created an additional “missing” response category for each of the three relationship dynamic measures. We suspect that the high level of missing data for these three items was due to their placement at the end of the survey (the other measures used in this article appeared near the beginning of the survey). Some students with ambivalent feelings about their families or who did not feel comfortable sharing financial information may also have skipped some of these questions. In our final sample of 750 students, 92 were missing data on financial dependence, 134 on emotional closeness, and 129 on sentiments about asking parents for money.
Analysis
We initially analyzed data separately for each school; after confirming that each school showed similar patterns of results, we combined schools into a single sample and included a control variable for the school attended (reference: NE) in regression models. Table 1 presents descriptive statistics across three mutually exclusive prepandemic housing categories: (a) with parents, (b) off campus (without parents), and (c) on campus (see the online Supplemental Material for descriptive statistics and significance tests by school). To provide an overview of the broader institutional context, Table 1 includes students who were living with their parents before the pandemic, but the rest of the article focuses on the housing transitions of students living outside the parental home in February 2020 (N = 750).
Restricting our analyses to the 750 students who did not already live with their parents at the onset of the pandemic, we conducted t tests and chi-square tests to examine prepandemic differences in the characteristics of students living off campus versus on campus in February 2020 (Table 2). We then used t tests and chi-square tests to examine how returning home was related to various student and family characteristics, with separate analyses for students living off campus (Table 3) and on campus (Table 4).
Chi-Square Tests and t Tests Comparing Students Living on versus off Campus in February 2020.
p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.
Off-Campus Students: Returns to the Parental Home (Chi-Square Tests and t Tests).
p < .10. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.
On-Campus Students: Returns to the Parental Home (Chi-Square Tests and t Tests).
p < .10. *p < .05. **p < .01.
Building on these descriptive findings, we estimated binary logistic regression models to further examine the explanatory potential of these variables in predicting returns to the parental home (Table 5). In Model 1, we combined all students living outside the parental home in February 2020 into a single group and included a variable indicating whether the student lived off campus versus on campus. This enabled us to examine whether living on campus was associated with greater odds of returning home after accounting for preexisting sociodemographic differences between off-campus and on-campus students, such as off-campus students being older. Finally, we estimated separate models predicting returns home among off-campus students (Model 2) and on-campus students (Model 3).
Binary Logistic Regression Predicting Moving Home due to COVID-19 (Odds Ratios).
p < .10. *p < .05. **p < .01. ***p < .001.
Results
Table 1 presents descriptive statistics for 1,212 students in three mutually exclusive prepandemic housing categories: (a) parents’ home, (b) off campus (without parents), and (c) on campus.
Prepandemic Living Arrangements
Narrowing our focus to the 750 students living outside the parental home in February 2020, we conducted t tests and chi-square tests to identify preexisting differences in the characteristics of students living off campus versus on campus before the transition to remote instruction. The results are shown in Table 2.
We found significant differences between these groups across several variables. Regarding family background, the proportion of students living on campus was significantly higher among students whose parents had higher levels of educational attainment and those with married parents.
In terms of student characteristics, on-campus students tended to be younger, with an average age of just under 21 years old, compared to just under 28 for off-campus students. A few on-campus students reported living with a romantic partner (four students), sibling (eight students), or extended family member (two students), but the majority of students who reported living with one of these individuals lived off campus. Off-campus students were disproportionately White, and on-campus students were disproportionately Black. There were significant differences based on where a student grew up: Those who grew up outside the United States had the lowest rate of campus residence, those who grew up in the same state as the university they attended had the highest rate of campus residence, and those who grew up in a different U.S. state fell in between.
Finally, we observed significant differences across our measures of parent-child relationship dynamics. Students who were financially dependent on their parents for educational expenses had the highest rate of on-campus residence. Conversely, those who agreed that they did not like asking their parents for money and those who reported that they were not emotionally close to their parents had higher rates of off-campus residence.
Who Went Home?
Tables 3 and 4 reveal how moving home was related to students’ family background characteristics, employment experiences, sociodemographic characteristics, and parent-child relationship dynamics. We conducted separate analyses for students living off campus (Table 3) versus on campus in February 2020 (Table 4).
Off-campus students: rates of returning to the parental home
Among students living off campus in February 2020, we found significant differences in the rate of returning to the parental home across several student and family characteristics. Although off-campus students did not directly lose housing due to the campus closure like their peers in dorms, many lost employment. The rate of returning home among off-campus students who experienced job or wage loss due to the COVID-19 pandemic was almost double that of those who did not experience employment disruptions: 23 percent versus 14 percent.
Second, we observed higher rates of returning home among off-campus students across multiple indicators of family socioeconomic privilege. As shown in Table 3, 32 percent of off-campus students with a parent holding a graduate degree returned to the parental home compared to 17 percent among children of four-year college graduates and only 9 percent among children of high school graduates. Similarly, off-campus students who were financially dependent on their parents for educational expenses and those whose parents were married, both of which may correlate with economic privilege, demonstrated significantly higher rates of returning home than peers who were financially independent and those whose parents were not married to each other.
Returning to the parental home was also associated with life course characteristics indicating a student’s progress in the transition to adulthood: age and relationship status. Notably, only 3 percent of off-campus students who lived with a romantic partner in February 2020 returned to a parent’s home (four respondents). Supplemental analyses (not shown) revealed that three of the four cohabiting students who moved in with a parent had experienced employment disruptions.
On-campus students: rates of returning to the parental home
Students living on campus in February 2020 demonstrated an overall higher rate of returning home than off-campus peers: 66 percent of on-campus students moved home compared to only 18 percent of off-campus students. Associations between the variables examined and the incidence of returning home were generally similar in direction to those observed among off-campus students, but the differences were usually smaller in magnitude and less often statistically significant. Yet whereas sentiments about asking parents for money were not significantly related to returns home among off-campus students, on-campus students who rated the statement “Don’t like asking my parents for money” as moderately or very accurate were significantly and substantially more likely to have returned home than on-campus peers who expressed positive or neutral sentiments.
Predicting returns to the parental home
To further examine the explanatory potential of students’ family background, employment disruptions, sociodemographic characteristics, and parent-child relationship dynamics in predicting returns to the parental home, we conducted a series of binary logistic regression models with returning home as the outcome variable. In the following, we highlight a few key patterns.
Model 1 examined the characteristics and circumstances associated with returns home for all students living outside the parental home in February 2020. This model demonstrates that living on campus (versus off campus) was associated with significantly higher odds of returning home, controlling for all other variables (OR = 2.87; p < .001). Although not surprising given both universities’ instructions for on-campus students to leave campus if possible, Model 1 confirms that the lower rate of returning home among off-campus students was not merely an artifact of the group’s older age and larger share of cohabiting students (both of these factors remained independently significant, each associated with a lower likelihood of returning home). However, we focus on interpreting the results from Models 2 and 3, which examined the characteristics associated with returning home separately for students living off campus versus on campus, respectively.
Model 2 demonstrates that job or wage loss more than doubled the odds of returning home for off-campus students net of other factors, which highlights the role of material need. Conversely, indicators of adult status—older age and living with a romantic partner—were associated with lower odds of returning to the parental home (as a robustness check, we estimated a model that excluded students above the age of 30 to see if age remained a significant negative predictor of returns home—it did). Although cohabiting students tended to be older in our sample, both age and living with a romantic partner were independently significant and negative predictors of returning to the parental home.
Living with a sibling or an extended family member was also significantly associated with lower odds of moving in with a parent. Notably, all three living arrangements—with a partner, sibling, or extended family member— each reduced the odds of a return to the parental home by more than 85 percent, highlighting the substantial influence of these relationships amid pandemic-related disruptions.
Lastly, there were differences in the likelihood of returning to the parental home based on race/ethnicity and where a respondent grew up. Net of all other variables, Black students had lower odds of returning to the parental home compared to White students, and students who grew up outside the United States had lower odds than those who grew up in the same state as the university they attended.
Model 3 investigated how the same variables were related to the home-returning patterns of students living on campus in February 2020. Having married parents was associated with significantly higher odds of returning to the parental home for on-campus students. Yet other variables that were significant predictors for the off-campus group—employment disruptions, age, and living with a romantic partner, sibling, or extended family—were not significant in the model predicting returns home among on-campus students. As shown in Table 2, the range of ages in the on-campus group was narrower compared to off-campus students, and very few on-campus students reported living with a romantic partner, sibling, or extended family member, which may explain why these variables were not significant.
The relationship between moving home and feelings about asking parents for money also differed between on-campus and off-campus students. Whereas this variable was not significant for off-campus students, on-campus students who agreed that they did not like to ask their parents for money were significantly and substantially more likely to have returned home than those expressing neutral sentiments.
Finally, because the other student and family characteristics we examined may influence parent-child relationship dynamics, we estimated additional models without these variables (see online Supplemental Material). Although the results were largely unchanged, removing parent-child relationship dynamics attenuated the effect of job or wage loss among off-campus students, reducing this variable to marginal statistical significance (OR = 1.82, p < .1).
Discussion
Our results provide novel insight into the factors that influenced college students’ decisions to return to a parent’s home following COVID-19 campus closures in March 2020. Consistent with prior characterizations of the parental home as a private safety net for young adult children, our findings indicate that material needs due to loss of campus housing (for on-campus students) or employment (for off-campus students) increased the likelihood of a return to the parental home. But need alone did not fully explain students’ housing decisions. After controlling for these indicators of material need, we found that older off-campus students and those living with a romantic partner, sibling, or extended family member were less likely to move in with a parent. These findings build on past research highlighting social class divides in undergraduates’ pandemic housing transitions, revealing the importance of life stage and relationships with other close social ties.
The Parental Home as a Safety Net
Students living on campus (versus off campus) were more likely to move in with a parent, suggesting that a pressing need for alternative housing motivated these returns. Although fewer off-campus students moved home, the fact that employment disruptions were associated with greater odds of a return to the parental home among off-campus students indicates that loss of income may have produced a comparable situation of material need. These patterns are consistent with prior characterizations of coresidence with parents as a private safety net for young adults (Newman 2012; Swartz et al. 2011) and studies linking returns home to job loss and relationship dissolution (Kaplan 2012; Sandberg-Thoma, Snyder, and Jang 2015; Smits et al. 2010).
Financial strain resulting from a loss of income may have motivated off-campus students to save on incidental expenses (e.g., groceries) by living with their parents for a period or to save on rent if they could sublet their place to someone else (or even stop renting altogether). Employment disruptions may have also encouraged returns home by removing geographic constraints on students’ mobility. Whereas a student working near the university may have been motivated to stay local to keep their job, one who had already lost their position would have more geographic flexibility.
Adding to our understanding of the parental home as a private safety net, we found that the overall rates of returning home among off-campus students were significantly higher across multiple indicators of family socioeconomic privilege: higher parental education, having married parents, and financial dependence on parents for educational expenses (Table 3). This is broadly consistent with prior qualitative research suggesting that returning to the parental home was more common among students from privileged class backgrounds (Gillis et al. 2023; van Stee 2023a, 2023b). Moreover, financial dependence on parents for educational expenses signals a broader trend of the student’s material reliance on the parent(s) during the undergraduate years. It indicates a shared expectation between the student and their parent(s) for the student’s dependence on parental support during college, thus providing insight into parent-child relationship dynamics (van Stee 2023b).
The fact that rates of returning home among on-campus students were more similar across the variables examined (compared to the off-campus group) suggests that the immediate need for housing when the dorms closed took priority over factors that deterred returns home among off-campus students, who had the option to remain where they were. Even so, the rate of returning home was significantly higher among on-campus students whose parents were married than among on-campus students whose parents were not married (Table 4). This may indicate that parents who pool resources were better positioned to support an additional person living in the home (López Turley and Desmond 2011; Tach and Eads 2015; Widra and Luduvice 2021). Additionally, it may reflect relational dynamics stemming from parental divorce and/or remarriage that discouraged students from moving in with either parent (Kalmijn 2013; South and Lei 2015).
Prior qualitative work led us to expect a higher uptake of emergency campus housing among on-campus students from less advantaged social class backgrounds (van Stee 2023a, 2023b). Given that both universities in our study allowed residential students to request permission to remain on campus, we were surprised by the absence of observable differences by parental education in the on-campus group (Table 4). One possible explanation is that higher uptake of emergency campus housing among less privileged students may have been matched by a parallel trend of more privileged students moving into off-campus housing with peers (although the SE university explicitly discouraged this). Following this logic, family social class may have influenced students’ reasons for pursuing alternative housing arrangements and the type of housing chosen—but not the rate of returning to the parental home (Gillis et al. 2023).
The seeming departure from previous research findings may stem from differences in institutional characteristics. Compared to the state flagship university studied by Gillis et al. (2023) and the elite private university studied by van Stee (2023a, 2023b), the universities in our study enroll fewer students from highly privileged class backgrounds. Thus, class divides might be less pronounced in this context. Additionally, campus residents from lower socioeconomic backgrounds attending wealthier universities may have had access to institutional supports that made alternative housing arrangements more feasible for them compared to the students in our study.
Life Course Transitions and Evolving Role Expectations
Beyond material needs, our results demonstrate how parent-child relationships evolve as children grow older and establish new adult relationships with romantic partners. The finding that age and living with a romantic partner were each associated with lower odds of moving home (among off-campus students) aligns with prepandemic research demonstrating that rates of young adult coresidence with parents and financial support from parents decline as children grow older and form partnerships that provide a new potential source of support (Hartnett et al. 2013; Kuperberg 2023; Siennick 2011; South and Lei 2015; Swartz et al. 2011). Despite the potential for “unsettled times” (Swidler 1986) to disrupt established patterns of social behavior, our results suggest that expectations for residential independence among older and cohabiting students persisted during this crisis, deterring the activation of housing support from parents.
Drawing from prior research on kin tie activation, we propose two mechanisms through which age and living with a partner may have reduced the incidence of returns to the parental home: (1) access to resources and (2) evolving role expectations (Kuperberg 2023; Mazelis and Mykyta 2011, 2020; O’Brien et al. 2022). Older students and those in cohabiting relationships may have had access to material resources that reduced their need for parental support. With more years to work and save, older students may have accumulated savings that enabled them to maintain residential independence through periods of underemployment or unemployment (Kuperberg 2023). Likewise, cohabiting students have access to an additional intimate social tie—their romantic partner—who may have provided assistance, reducing the need for housing assistance from parents (Kuperberg 2023). Furthermore, the ability of cohabiting couples to pool resources and share living expenses may have contributed to a higher baseline level of financial stability that enabled partnered students to maintain residential independence despite employment disruptions.
The second mechanism hinges on culturally defined role expectations for parents and children, which evolve over the life course (Elder 1994; Johnson and Mollborn 2009; Kuperberg 2023; Min et al. 2022; Swartz et al. 2011). Although attitudes toward intergenerational coresidence vary across social divides, including age, race/ethnicity, gender, income level, and political affiliation (Cepa and Kao 2019; Fadeyi and Horowitz 2022), many U.S. young adults aspire to achieve (and maintain) residential independence from their parents (Vespa 2017). In the cultural context of the United States, moving out of the parental home is widely considered a marker of successful launching into adulthood (Fadeyi and Horowitz 2022; Lowe et al. 2013; McConville 2020; Newman 2012; Wellsch, Gelech, and Mazurik 2023). Thus, both students and their parents may have viewed a return to the parental home as more appropriate for a 21-year-old than a 29-year-old.
Successful launching may also mean establishing an independent household with a romantic partner. Entrance into cohabitation or marriage can influence whether children are considered independent adults by themselves and by others, potentially making them less likely to seek or accept help from their parents (Lowe et al. 2013; Mazelis and Mykyta 2020; Sarkisian 2006; Swartz et al. 2011). This finding aligns with Furstenberg et al.’s (2020:1404) claim that the nuclear family maintains a “considerable normative hold” in the United States despite an increase in multigenerational households over the past four decades (Bengtson 2001; Pilkauskas, Amorim, and Dunifon 2020). In the American nuclear family model, union formation marks a point of separation from one’s family of origin: Adult children are expected to leave their parents’ household to establish a new, self-sufficient family unit with their partner (Sarkisian 2006; Sarkisian and Gerstel 2008). Moreover, the high value placed on privacy for romantic couples may have made both parents and students averse to sharing a multigenerational home with the student’s partner. 3 Thus, returning to the parental home may have been perceived as more natural and desirable for a single student (who may still consider their parents’ home their true “home”) than one who had already established an independent household with their romantic partner (Seltzer et al. 2012).
Although we can conceptualize resources and role expectations as distinct mechanisms influencing the activation of parental support, they are deeply interconnected. Theories of relational work posit that economic transactions reflect and reinforce the social meanings attached to relationships (Bandelj 2020; Wherry 2016; Zelizer 2012). As Zelizer (2012:152) argues, “Not any economic transaction is compatible with any intimate relation. On the contrary, people work hard to find economic arrangements that both confirm their sense of what the relationship is about and sustain it.” Thus, access to a social tie’s material resources depends on the role expectations governing the relationship. The decision to seek help from a partner rather than a parent reflects and reinforces a redefinition of the parent-child tie. This redefinition positions the new couple as an independent unit in which each partner’s primary commitment is to the other, which aligns with the nuclear family ideology and the broader American cultural script of launching into independence from one’s family of origin. It suggests that the student’s primary safety net has shifted from the old parent-child tie to the new romantic partnership.
Other Family Safety Nets: Siblings and Extended Family
Although only a small fraction of students in our sample were living with siblings or extended family members at the onset of the pandemic, the fact that these living arrangements were associated with lower odds of returning to the parental home for off-campus students suggests that siblings and extended family, much like romantic partners, may have served as alternative sources of support that reduced students’ need to seek housing support from their parents. First, students who were already receiving material support from these relatives—perhaps in the form of a rent-free place to stay—may have continued to do so. In these cases, the students’ material reliance on family support may have served as a buffer against pandemic-induced disruptions such as job loss. Second, even if the siblings or extended family members were not already serving as primary sources of support before the pandemic, students may have sought assistance from them in response to pandemic-related challenges. Alternatively, the direction of support may have been reversed (or reciprocal) but had the same effect: If the students were providing care for the siblings or relatives they lived with or contributing to the household in other ways, they may have felt a sense of responsibility to stay.
Moreover, if these students’ prepandemic decisions to live with siblings or extended family were influenced by parental death, absence, financial limitations, or strained parent-child relationships, it stands to reason that the young adults would once again turn to their coresident relatives rather than their parents (McDougal and George 2016; Robinson et al. 2023). Taken together, these findings underscore the importance of nonparental kin ties as an alternative source of support for some college students.
Housing Support versus Financial Support
Our analysis revealed an unexpected pattern: Negative sentiments about asking parents for money were associated with higher odds of returning to the parental home among on-campus students (Table 3, Table 5). At first glance, this finding seems counterintuitive: If shared housing is a form of parental assistance, wouldn’t those reluctant to seek financial support also be reluctant to seek housing support? Drawing from prior research on kin support, coresidence, and young adulthood, we suggest three interpretations.
First, on-campus students may have viewed returning home as an alternative to asking their parents for money to cover independent living expenses when the dormitories closed (Mazelis and Kuperberg 2022). Students may have conceptualized housing support as distinct from (and preferable to) direct financial support (Mazelis 2017), perhaps because they perceived it to be less stigmatizing or felt it would impose less of a burden on parents.
Second, given that students were surveyed a year after the campus closures, the direction of causality might be reversed: The experience of moving in with a parent during the pandemic could have negatively influenced students’ inclination to ask their parents for financial assistance. Students may have felt that seeking additional support would be an excessive reliance on their parents, violating norms of adult independence (Mazelis and Kuperberg 2022). Additionally, they may have been concerned about burdening their parents or have developed resentment toward the restricted freedom they experienced at home after experiencing more freedom in student housing (Aquilino 2006; Hall and Zygmunt 2021; van Stee 2023b).
Third, the relationship between attitudes toward requesting financial help from parents and returning home might also be a selection effect. Some parents may consider shared housing a means to support their young adult children when they cannot offer cash transfers (Aquilino 2006; Berry 2006; Mazelis and Kuperberg 2022). Net of parents’ educational attainment and contributions to educational expenses, students from families with more limited financial resources may have been more reluctant to ask their parents for money while their parents, in turn, would have been more likely to offer housing as an alternative to monetary support. Although our data do not enable us to adjudicate between these three explanations, it is plausible that all three factors contributed to the patterns we observed.
Limitations and Directions for Future Research
This study has several limitations that suggest future research directions. First, although we examined patterns by parental education and parents’ contributions to the student’s educational expenses, we were unable to directly measure parents’ economic resources. Data sets that include measures of parental income or wealth could reveal further socioeconomic variation not captured in our study.
Second, data limitations prevent us from identifying children of immigrants or international students (we can only determine whether a student grew up in the United States), making it difficult to disentangle variation by race/ethnicity, immigration background, and citizenship status. Prior research highlights the importance of these factors in shaping patterns and meanings of intergenerational coresidence (Britton 2013; Caputo and Cagney 2023; Hardie and Seltzer 2016; Ho and Park 2019; Lanuza 2020), and recent research from the pandemic describes older siblings in immigrant families assisting with younger siblings’ remote schooling during the pandemic (Delgado 2020). International students experienced unique challenges related to visa policies and travel restrictions (Mbous et al. 2024).
Third, the timing of the survey means our sample excludes students who dropped out or graduated before March 2021. Those who dropped out may have done so because of pandemic-related housing insecurity. Given the negative association between older age and returns to the parental home, it seems likely that graduating seniors would have had lower rates of returning home.
Fourth, there may have been confusion about the definition of a “dorm” at the SE school, leading students in privately owned (but dorm-like) student housing to mistakenly classify themselves as dorm residents in our survey. Indeed, attending the SE university (versus NE) was associated with lower odds of moving in with a parent (Table 5). Given that these privately owned buildings did not close when the university transitioned to remote instruction, the incidence of returning home reported for our on-campus category should be interpreted as a conservative estimate of the true proportion of campus residents who moved in with a parent during this period.
Fifth, there were likely relational dynamics at play that our variables could not capture. For example, students may have been drawn home by a sense of obligation to care for siblings or elderly relatives or to provide emotional, financial, or practical support to their parents (Delgado 2020; Gillis et al. 2023; Umamaheswar and Tan 2020; van Stee 2023a, 2023b). Moreover, it is impossible to capture complex relational dynamics in a single survey item, and our measure of parent-child emotional closeness is further limited by the fact that it only reflects the child’s point of view and was collected a year after the campus closings.
Sixth, although this study offers insight into the conditions shaping whether students moved in with a parent, it does not fully explore the alternative housing arrangements some students pursued. Other studies describe undergraduates applying to stay in their university’s emergency campus housing, moving in with a romantic partner or extended family member, and subletting the off-campus apartments of peers who themselves moved in with a parent (Gillis et al. 2023; van Stee 2023a, 2023b, 2023c). Future research should investigate the factors influencing students’ decisions to seek support from these other social ties during the pandemic.
Finally, although our data set offers insight into a diverse student sample at two regional public universities, it is not nationally representative, and it is not representative of more elite schools, private schools, community colleges, or small liberal arts colleges. Experiences at different types of schools may be shaped by contextual factors we are unable to address.
Conclusion
This study advances research on kin tie activation, intergenerational coresidence, and the transition to adulthood by clarifying the conditions shaping whether undergraduates accessed housing support from their parents in the year following COVID-19 campus closures (Lei and South 2023; Mazelis and Mykyta 2011, 2020; O’Brien et al. 2022; South and Lei 2015; Swartz et al. 2011). Our results indicate that although students’ material needs resulting from a loss of housing (among on-campus students) or employment (among off-campus students) significantly affected the decision to move in with a parent, age and relationships with other close social ties also played crucial roles in shaping students’ choices.
Examining the housing transitions of off-campus students (who tended to be older, were more often living with a romantic partner or relative, and for whom moving home was ostensibly more voluntary) illuminates how life course transitions and access to alternative sources of support may shape the utilization of a parental safety net. This perspective is not present in existing research on undergraduates’ pandemic housing decisions, which has emphasized social class divides (Gillis et al. 2023; van Stee 2023a, 2023b). Thus, our study’s findings add a piece of the puzzle neglected by existing research, demonstrating how parents’ roles also varied between students at different stages of the transition to adulthood and with different constellations of close social ties. Moreover, they contribute to a broader understanding of how parent-child relationships evolve during the transition to adulthood, influencing decisions to seek parental support during times of need and uncertainty.
Supplemental Material
sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231241259625 – Supplemental material for Activating Family Safety Nets: Understanding Undergraduates’ Pandemic Housing Transitions
Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231241259625 for Activating Family Safety Nets: Understanding Undergraduates’ Pandemic Housing Transitions by Elena G. van Stee, Arielle Kuperberg and Joan Maya Mazelis in Socius
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Jazmyn Edwards, Anurag Pant, Danny Turkson, and Suzy Xu for their research assistance. We would also like to thank Caitlin Daniel, Kate Epstein, Annaliese Grant, Samantha Jones, Joyce Kim, Cassie Mead, Letta Page, Adriana Scanteianu, Lyn Spillman, Jack Thornton, Andres Villatoro, members of the University of Pennsylvania’s Education and Inequality workshop, and an anonymous reviewer from Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science for their helpful advice and feedback on earlier drafts of this article. Claude 3 Opus, Grammarly, and ChatGPT 3.5 were used for editing, nongenerative purposes in the preparation of this article.
Funding
This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants 1947603 and 1947604, and Elena van Stee was supported by a predoctoral fellowship from the Institute of Education Sciences under Award 3505B200035 to the University of Pennsylvania. The opinions expressed are the authors’ and do not represent the views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
Notes
Author Biographies
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
