Students’ on- and off-campus hostel accommodation in Nigerian Federal universities is presently experiencing deficiencies in quality and quantity and it is already well-documented in the literature. A significant gap in the literature is the lack of comparative studies between the on- and off-campus hostel accommodation in these universities. This is a gap the present study set out to fill, by adopting housing habitability indicators to measure the level of defects in students’ hostels in the selected Federal universities in southwestern Nigeria. The survey design technique was adopted for the study. A probability proportion to size sampling technique was used to select 1207 students and 193 hostels. Five housing habitability indicators (foundation, flooring, wall, roof, and wall paint) were used to assess the level of defect in the students’ hostels, and a hypothesis on significant differences was tested. The study revealed that on-campus hostels scored better than off-campus hostels regarding the indicators used. Observed variations in the hostels’ housing was found to be statistically significant, using the two-tailed Mann Whitney U test, based on an alpha value of 0.05 (foundation: U =2,437.500, z= 2.006, p = .045; flooring: U = 2,757.000,z = 3.149, p =.002; wall: U =2,528,000, z = 2.152, p = .031; roof: U = 2,454,000, z =2.071, p = .038 and paint: U = 1,587.000, z = -2.131, p = .033). The study revealed that off-campus hostels had higher levels of defect than on-campus hostels; 75.28% of the students preferred on-campus to off-campus hostel accommodation; absence of adequate monitoring of off-campus hostels, absence of planned and corrective maintenance practice, and the government’s lukewarm attitude towards providing adequate on-campus accommodation were identified as the major contributing factors to inadequate on-campus hostels accommodation in the Federal Universities. The introduction of adequate standardization and monitoring of the off campus hostels and the adoption of comprehensive proactive planned provision and maintenance of on-campus hostel accommodation in the Federal Universities were recommended strategies to ensure habitable students’ hostel accommodation.
Adelowokan et al. (Wed,) studied this question.