Students who live closer to campus get better grades, study finds

Students with shorter commutes to their university tend to perform better academically as a result, researchers have found.

Academics from Politecnico di Milano, known as Polimi, concluded that those who live within 15 to 20 minutes of campus could see a grade boost of up to 1.5 points on a standard 0 to 30 Italian scale, according to their study, published in the journal Studies in Higher Education.

They estimated the typical commute times of first-year engineering undergraduates at the university by training machine learning algorithms on anonymised GPS smartphone data, then using them to calculate commute length based on students’ term time addresses.

Led by Arianna Burzacchi and Lidia Rossi, both PhD candidates at Polimi, the researchers then studied the impact of students’ commute time on their grades, controlling for factors including age, family income and high school performance.

“The results of this study have the potential to significantly influence the educational experience of students, particularly for those who frequently commute long distances to their campus,” the study says, noting that the findings offer “insights that could inform policies for the enhancement of students’ learning experience”.

Using GPS data rather than relying on self-reported data enabled the researchers to estimate the length of students’ commutes more accurately, Ms Rossi told Times Higher Education. “People tend to underestimate their travel times,” she said. “If you take a 15-minute walk, you may perceive that differently to 15 minutes on the tram, for instance.”

While the authors expected to find a correlation between commute time and academic performance, they noted that the benefits diminished as travel times grew longer than the 15- to 20-minute mark.

“I was expecting to find that the more time you spent commuting, the more your grade decreased, but what we discovered was that after a certain threshold, the impact of commuting time was the same, whether you travelled for 30 minutes or an hour,” Ms Burzacchi said. “Either you have the benefit of being closer to the university, or you don’t have that benefit.”

The 15- to 20-minute threshold, she noted, mirrors the urban planning concept of a “15-minute city”, which holds that residents should have access to everything they need within 15 minutes of walking or, in some variants, any other mode of transport.

Ms Burzacchi and Ms Rossi said that their study could help universities, particularly those in cities such as Milan, to level the playing field for incoming students. “Universities should be conscious that travel time highly impacts students’ performance,” Ms Burzacchi said.

Institutions should consider travel time when building new student accommodation, she said, and could also work with public transport companies to ensure students have access to timely, affordable travel. Other policies could include “legislation that would make accessible housing economically accessible”, she added.

emily.dixon@timeshighereducation.com