Family Housing

The Married Student

Once upon a time the American university once understood that a student might also be a husband and father.

After World War II, the G.I. Bill brought millions of veterans into higher education. They were older than the customary undergraduate population and many arrived with wives and children. At the University of Michigan, roughly one-third of the first great wave of returning veterans were married. The University responded with Veterans Village, apartments at Willow Run and, eventually, the Northwood married-student communities.

The University of Idaho and others managed much the same problem. Veterans returned to campus with wives and young children, overwhelming housing designed principally for single students. Idaho assembled three temporary “Vet Villages” from trailers and surplus federal buildings. Those makeshift communities were eventually succeeded by purpose-built married-student and family housing.

These were not peripheral welfare programs. They were physical accommodations to a national policy: educate returning American servicemen without requiring them to postpone marriage and family life while doing so.

Michigan’s Northwood and Idaho’s family housing therefore belong to an important architectural and social tradition. The university did not assume that education and family formation occupied separate stages of life. It built for both.

As universities again expand family housing, the useful question is not simply how many apartments they are building. It is whether the institution still understands the purpose that gave rise to them: making higher education compatible with forming and supporting a young family — an American family.