There are several advantages to availability of students’ hostel accommodation to students of institutions of higher learning.Some of these advantages as highlighted by Olotuah (2011) include:
- Improved reading culture
- Extra-curricular activities
- Security
- Moral training
- National integration
- Relationship building
- Students’ personnel management
- Improved reading culture: Students who live in students’ hostel accommodation usually possess more desire to read when compared with their counterparts who live away from the students’ hostel accommodations. Students’ hostel accommodations usually have fewer distractions which can deter students’ reading ability. It is also noted that by leaving together in students’ hostel accommodations less serious students are usually encouraged by seeing their colleagues reading (Akpan, 2010).
- Extra-curricular activities: Student hostel accommodation provides students with a better opportunity to take part in extra-curriculum activities such as clubs, games, sports and other social activities that are necessary to making them fit into the society as better citizens. Living together in students’ hostel facilities give students opportunities to discover extracurricular activities which they can engage in with their colleague to foster better friendship.
- Security: Students’ hostel accommodation especially the on-campus students’ hostel accommodation provide maximum security for the students living in the hostel by ensuring that unwanted visitors are kept of the hostel accommodation and they also ensure that rules and regulations guiding the conduct of students in the campus are upheld in the hostel facilities provided by the institution. This is achieved by maintaining security personnel at the hostel accommodation to monitor the conducts of students and visitors to the hostel. In some cases, especially in private institutions students are made to obtain an exit permit whenever they want to travel from the hostel facilities.
- Moral Training: In hostel accommodations provided by institutions of higher learning rules and regulations guiding the institutions are also enforced in the hostel accommodation thereby ensuring that students maintain a certain level of morality. These include the types of visitors that are allowed into the hostel accommodation and at what time of the day. When to leave and when to return to the hostel accommodation, and so many other codes of conducts which are geared toward maintaining civil behaviours.
- National integration: The students’ hostel accommodation serves as a very important tool in national integration by bringing students from different parts of the country to live under the same roof. This enables them to understand other peoples’ culture and better relate with them by knowing what they believe and why they do that.
- Private relationship: Students’ hostel accommodation helps students to develop relationships which can remain all through their lives. In co-ed hostel accommodations, relationships with the opposite sex can lead to marriages.
- Student personnel management: Students’ hostel accommodation is a major aspect of students’ personal management which parents and the society expect from institutions to provide for their students (Ukeje,2012).
Akpan, P. (2010). Housing conditions and environment quality in Ikot Ekpene, Nigeria.African Journal of Social and Policy Studies, 5(9), 78-81.
Olotuah, A. (2011). Low income workers housing:intervention by public sector international by the public sector. International Journal of Economic and Development Issues, 17 (9), 16-22.
Ukeje, B. (2012). Educational administration. Enugu: Fourth Dimension Publishers Limited.
