Academic Tenure and Housing Choice

Abstract

This study tests a model of housing choice to cross-sectional data from the faculty at Middle Tennessee State University. The faculty participants include tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenured professors. The study employs econometric regression, which conditions household decisions based on a variety of factors. The variable of interest in this study is academic tenure. Like past studies, my results indicate that demographic and economic differences largely explain the housing tenures choices that individuals and families make. The results show that being single or Latino decreases the chance of homeownership, and these results conform with past research. Moreover, the regression shows that faculty who have achieved academic tenure are significantly more likely to own a home than those who have not achieved academic tenure. With the results, there is enough evidence to reject the null hypothesis and accept the alternative hypothesis that academic tenure does quantitatively influences housing choice.