Daija Holliday, 25, moved from North Carolina to Marquette University in Milwaukee looking for somewhere safe and affordable where she could also build a community, MarketWatch reported.
She found it at St. Camillus Life Plan Community in suburban Wauwatosa, home to more than 600 older adults.
Holliday pays about $500 a month for an independent apartment while pursuing a counseling psychology degree.
Her required volunteer hours go into socializing over coffee and the newspaper, helping residents run errands, leading Saturday morning fitness classes and organizing game nights.
“It’s my family away from home. I always feel like they have my back,” she told MarketWatchadding that she grew up in her grandparents’ house, so the arrangement felt natural.
Marquette’s Students in Residence program began in 2022 and will place five students at St. Camillus this fall.
Shojin Samson, 23, came from India to study crime analysis at Marquette on his first trip overseas and told MarketWatch that St. Camillus resembled the mixed-generation community he had left behind.
Stacy Barnes, the Wisconsin Geriatric Education Center director who founded the program, said it screens for maturity and wants students open to genuine social interaction with older adults, rather than those looking only for cheap rent.
Students get access to the campus amenities, which include a gym, swimming pool, movie theater, restaurants, lounges and a pub.
St. Camillus also issues each of them a monthly restaurant credit to encourage them to eat with residents.
The living model is growing as Americans contend with both a shortage of affordable housing and an epidemic of loneliness.
Loneliness runs through the young as well as the old, said Jennifer Molinsky, director of the Housing an Aging Society Program at the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies, who told MarketWatch that housing the two groups together counters stereotypes and brings in energy and skills a building would otherwise lack.
Marquette modeled its program on Humanitas, a care home in the Dutch city of Deventer that began taking in students in 2012.
Humanitas gives students small rent-free apartments in return for at least 30 hours a month spent acting as good neighbors, Gea Sijpkes, who runs the home, told PBS NewsHour in 2015.
Students there watch sports with residents and mark their birthdays, and staff say the most valuable thing they do is sit with residents who fall ill, which blunts the isolation that sets in during sickness.
St. Olaf College in Minnesota began housing students in retirement-community townhouses alongside senior residents during the 2024-2025 academic year.
The arrangement started as a stopgap during dormitory renovations and was made permanent after students asked to stay on, according to The Olaf Messengerthe college’s student newspaper.
Judson Manor, a senior living campus in Cleveland, has been taking in music students as artists in residence since 2010, AARP reported in 2019.
A Judson board member started it to relieve a housing shortage at the nearby Cleveland Institute of Music, giving students free room and board in exchange for performances, errands and time with neighbors, and it was already drawing at least four times as many applicants as it had places.