While an educational role has long been recognized as a function of college student housing, administrators, faculty members, parents, and even students have difficulty integrating this expectation into an operation which also has very definite business, service, and management roles. This question is even more striking in the Partium Region (crossborder region of Ukraine, Romania, Hungary) where the services of college housing has been completely altered since 2000 due to the growing popularity of PPP constructions. While many rely on neo-institutionalist approaches in their account of how the forms of campus housing impact the behavior and attitudes of students, the micro level processes at work are frequently paid insufficient attention. Several recent studies on campus housing have demonstrated that this alteration also entails extensive changes in student communities, extracurricular activities and attitudes towards norms and disciplining.

 The purpose of this paper is to define the change in residential college students’ attitudes towards norms and different forms of disciplining. Recent empirical works argue that students having multiple group belongings react on the changing scenes of residential halls with two-sided behavior. They are changing their behavior in accordance with the norms of the actual group they are in.  Since the number of atypical students is growing in the region, this theoretical framework is gradually losing its explanatory power. Little can be understood by unraveling the relationships between socio-economic determinants and students’ norm obedience.

Cas Wouters however highlights that not only the levels of norms obedience are multiplying but also norms themselves and attitudes towards norms are changing.  He says that since the end of the nineteenth century, the hitherto dominant formalization – the trend toward more extensive, more detailed, and stricter regimes of manners and emotions – has been overshadowed by a long term of informalization. Informalization processes seep into and color friendships and everyday conventions of social interactions. The changing sociability and shifting patterns of social relations erode barriers between people and social groups and new forms of proximity and distance come into being. As most social codes became more flexible and differentiated, manner and emotion regulation became the more decisive criteria for status or reputation, which means that the fulcrum of the balance between external and internal social controls has moved in the direction of the latter. While the pressures of social control have been intensified, self-control have increasingly become both the focus and the locus of external social controls.

By the means of analyzing the time management of residential college students in the region in terms of learning, extracurricular and physiological activities together with the values attached to them, we detected the process of informalization  in the Eastern part of Hungary where the rate of institutions built in PPP construction is high. At the same time these differences were not recognizable in the other two countries of the region where PPP constructions in campus housing are not so popular. The presentation gives an insight into the comparison of regional institutions from the aspect of changing character of students’ norm obedience.

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