A ton of college age students literally can not go to college right now. Are they included in these stats, or are college age students listed as living at home by default? I cannot make it out from the link.
If so, this seems really obvious and that is was useless research.
The full news release from Pew [0] indicates that this is analysis of the monthly Current Population Survey [1] conducted by the Department of Labor.
"The analysis of recent trends and characteristics is based on the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS), conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics."
In particular, further in Pew's methodology section ("How we did this"), the authors note that the CPS counts all unmarried students in dorms as living with their parents. This is a pretty big caveat. However, this still indicates an shift of students living off-campus who moved back in with their parents.
Additionally:
"The Current Population Survey (CPS), also referred to as the household survey, is a monthly sample survey of 60,000 eligible households conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics
The survey is conducted using a combination of live telephone and in-person interviews with household respondents."
So, the shift is driven by surveys, rather than generic assumptions.
That said, IMO, the value-add of this analysis is not the top-line number, but the relative shift (5% absolute increase _since February_).
The CPS response rate has plummeted from 90% to 50% since the pandemic. I wonder how the affects the comparability of data from different phases of the survey.
If we assume that they are counted as living at home it makes the statistics rather less meaningful as we are currently going through a situation that is temporarily causing them to live at home.
I suppose if you made a category 'temporarily living at home', then you would also be able to track after Corona how many students remained living at home (which might be an indicator of economic damage)
And I would argue the rest shouldn’t. Pandemic aside most universities are kicking people out for socializing too much. What value does that leave you paying for? In person lectures?
If so, this seems really obvious and that is was useless research.