Commuting and college student wellbeing

Commuting to college is a prominent feature of student life in many countries. We study the relationship between living arrangements, commute time, and wellbeing for full-time undergraduate college students in Ireland. Exploiting geographic variation in system-wide accessibility to higher education as an instrumental variable, we find that living at home reduces wellbeing for female students but not for males. We also show that long commutes are independently associated with very large increases in poor wellbeing for female students. Our results challenge the theory that disutility from commuting is compensated by other factors relating to where an individual lives.