Your freshman year of college should be one of the most exciting years of your life. But living in a 12×12 shoebox room with cinderblock walls with another person and sharing a bathroom with your entire hall can put a damper on the fun pretty quickly.
Fortunately, more colleges are offering single rooms and even apartment style housing starting your first year on campus. If privacy and independence matter to you, you should take a look at these schools.
This guide covers the 7 top colleges with apartment style dorms for freshmen.
Table of Contents
- Colleges With Apartment Style Dorms for Freshmen
- Colleges With Apartment Style Dorms for Freshmen: The Bottom Line
Colleges With Apartment Style Dorms for Freshmen
In addition to having more single room options, colleges are starting to offer more apartment style dorms for freshmen. This is a great option for students who want more independence and privacy.
These dorms typically have private bedrooms, and their bathrooms are shared only by the residents of the apartment or suite, not the entire hall. Some even offer bathrooms that only two people share. Apartment style dorms also usually feature a kitchen or at least a kitchenette.
Most apartment style dorms have laundry facilities in the apartment or suite, but at the very least, they’re usually available in the building. Other amenities often found in this type of housing include parking and even maid service (usually for an additional cost).
Apartment-style housing for college freshmen is a great option for students who want more freedom and independence than a dorm offers but either go to a school that requires students to live on campus or don’t want the hassle of finding an off-campus apartment.
Here are seven colleges with apartment style dorms for freshmen.
The University of Alabama
The University of Alabama is a large university in Tuscaloosa with over 30,000 students. It’s known for its football program, but it has highly regarded academics as well, particularly in programs such as engineering and business.
The campus is spread out over several hundred acres and includes both academic and residential buildings. Freshmen at the University of Alabama are required to live in on-campus housing, which includes several apartment-style dormitories.
Students in the honors college get first dibs on apartment-style housing at Alabama. The honors dorms (which are really more like apartments) are located in the Ridgecrest community.
These apartment style dorms have between two and four bedrooms per unit. Each student has their own bedroom but shares a common living area and kitchenette (everything but the stove and oven) with their roommates. The apartments are furnished and include utilities such as cable television and internet access.
Auburn University
Auburn University is a large public university located in the town of Auburn, about a 45-minute drive from the state capital of Montgomery. It offers a true college town atmosphere with a sprawling campus, a kitschy downtown strip, and big-time football (though the team’s record against archrival Alabama, covered above, hasn’t been great in recent years).
Auburn is the state of Alabama’s land grant university, so it has a history of being an “ag” school, but it offers a variety of undergraduate and graduate programs. Its highest-ranked departments include engineering, business, and agriculture. Like its archrival Alabama, Auburn is a member of the SEC athletic conference.
Auburn’s campus is spread out over 1,800 acres and includes many beautiful buildings and scenery. The university also has its own lake, which is popular among students for fishing, canoeing, and kayaking.
Auburn doesn’t require freshmen to live on campus, but about 60% of them choose to do so. Living on campus is a great way to meet new people and get immersed in the social scene from day one.
In addition to traditional dormitories, Auburn offers apartment-style housing, including for freshmen, with honors college students receiving preference. Each student has their own bedroom and shares a kitchen, living room, and either one or two bathrooms with their apartment/suite mates.
Brigham Young University
Brigham Young University is a private Mormon university located in Provo, Utah. The school was founded in 1875 by Brigham Young, the second president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
The university offers more than 100 undergraduate majors, along with dozens of graduate programs. BYU’s most popular majors include business, engineering, communication, psychology, and family studies. The school’s admissions process has gotten highly competitive in recent years; fewer than 60% of applicants were admitted for the fall 2021 incoming class, and the average ACT score has climbed to a 29.
BYU students come from all 50 states and more than 100 countries. The student body is about evenly split between men and women. About three-quarters of students are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
BYU offers both traditional dorm housing and apartments for freshmen. Be warned, however, that the freedom and independence that most people associate with apartment living doesn’t really apply to campus housing at BYU. Because it’s a Mormon school, the rules are strict. There are restrictions on opposite-sex visitation as well as complete bans on alcohol and tobacco. The penalties for breaking these rules can be as severe as expulsion from the university.
The University of Central Florida
The University of Central Florida (UCF) is a public university in Orlando, Florida. With roughly 60,000 undergraduates, UCF is one the largest universities in the United States by undergraduate enrollment — some years it’s the largest.
UCF has a diverse student body that includes students from all 50 states and over 140 countries. It offers more than 100 undergraduate degree programs, with its most popular majors including business, computer science, engineering, nursing, and psychology.
The school also has a strong athletic program, competing in the American Athletic Conference. In 2017, UCF was the only FBS college football team to finish with an undefeated record, but it was left out of the playoff by the selection committee due to a perceived weaker schedule than the teams that were included. At the end of the season, the school declared itself National Champions, and then-Florida Governor Rick Scott signed an executive order affirming UCF’s declaration.
UCF was long considered a “commuter school,” as many students have traditionally lived off campus or commuted from their parent’s homes. Recently, however, the school has gone on a building spree, creating many new housing options, including apartment-style dorms for freshmen.
The apartment style dorms housing students admitted to the university’s Burnett Honors College are the nicest ones on campus. They offer private bedrooms, kitchens, and bathrooms that are shared by only two residents. Freshmen not in the honors college can live in apartment style housing too, but it’s more expensive than traditional housing and goes quickly, so get your deposit in early!
The College of Charleston
The College of Charleston is a public college located in the historic city of Charleston, South Carolina. It’s known as a public liberal arts college because of its small class sizes and focus on undergraduate education. Classes at the C of C are taught almost exclusively by tenured professors, not TAs.
The college has an enrollment of about 11,000 students, and the campus size is about 70 acres and it’s integrated with the historic Charleston downtown. Freshmen are not required to live on campus, and many choose to rent houses in some of the historic neighborhoods adjacent to the school. Be warned, though: rent prices in Charleson are not cheap, so if you want to rent a house or apartment off campus, you’ll need quite a bit of money or quite a few roommates.
The college experience at the College of Charleston is unique because of its location. It’s not a traditional sports and tailgating school with a massive quad and green lawns. But the city of Charleston is a beautiful, historic place with a lot to offer in terms of culture and recreation. There are many opportunities for students to get involved on campus and in the community.
Students who choose to live on campus have a variety of housing options available depending on their budget and living preferences. These options include apartment-style dorms for freshmen. However, many of the dorms the school calls “apartment style” are more like suites with living rooms. Many don’t have kitchens (or even kitchenettes), and the bedrooms are shared between two or even three students.
The University of Kentucky
The University of Kentucky is a large research university and the flagship institution for the state of Kentucky. It is located in the city of Lexington, the second-largest metro area in the state, located between Knoxville, TN and Cincinnati, OH.
The university is home to over 22,000 undergraduates plus another 10,000-plus graduate students. It offers a plethora of majors and has a highly ranked law school and business school. The campus is spread out over 900 acres within the urban core of Lexington and features an impressive array of outdoor green spaces for a city school.
UK has a diverse student body — most students come from in state, but you’ll find classmates from all over the country and even the world if you look. Because the campus is situated right in downtown Lexington, students have plenty of opportunities to get involved in both on-campus activities and with the local community. Volunteerism and humanitarian work are popular at UK.
At Kentucky, students are known for their school spirit, particularly where basketball is concerned — though current football coach Mark Stoops has had a thing or two to say about the idea that UK is strictly a basketball school.
Just off campus, Lexington has a thriving downtown with historic buildings, museums, and restaurants. It’s also home to the Kentucky Horse Park, which is the most visited tourist attraction in the state.
Kentucky’s apartment-style dorms for freshmen aren’t actually full apartments, as most don’t feature kitchens. But they offer all the privacy of an apartment, including single bedrooms and a living area shared by only two people. If you live in one of these dorms, you also get a full bed instead of the standard XL twin most colleges offer.
Temple University
Temple University is another school like C of C that is integrated directly into the surrounding city, in this case Philadelphia. If safety is a huge concern for you, you might think twice about Temple, as its location in North Philly is rough around the edges, to say the least. However, Temple has the largest campus police force in the nation, and they work tirelessly to keep students safe.
If you want a true on-campus college experience without having to worry about things like cooking and cleaning, Temple can provide it. Many freshmen at Temple live in apartment-style or at least suite-style dorms, some of them (but not all) including private bedrooms. Others have shared bedrooms (some even being triples) and all of the apartment style dorms at Temple have living rooms, kitchens or kitchenettes, and bathrooms that are shared by the entire suite.
You also have the option of living off campus as a freshman at Temple. If you don’t know the area very well, however, you might want to stick with campus housing to start. The private housing nearby tends to be either very expensive (for a safe place with high security) or very dicey. Students have been robbed, mugged, and even killed walking in the neighborhoods just off campus, including in broad daylight. We don’t say this to scare you away from Temple, as the campus itself has a good safety record. But it’s impossible to understate to new freshmen how important it is to be careful off campus.
Colleges With Apartment Style Dorms for Freshmen: The Bottom Line
If you want to live in an apartment style dorm as a freshman in college, then you should research which colleges offer this type of living arrangement. The seven schools profiled above are a good place to start. Not only do they all offer apartment style housing for freshmen, but they are still residential schools (rather than commuter colleges where almost everyone lives at home with their parents) and they all have solid academic reputations.
If you do your research and focus on the right schools, you can secure comfortable housing that makes your freshman year a little less stressful.
