In the history of education, college represented an alternative to family life. At college, children and adolescents were separated from the care of their parents and integrated into a religious or secular community for their civic or professional education. While in origin, sending male children abroad to the medieval colleges of England, Italy, or France for many European families was considered an investment from which they would benefit by receiving back an educated son with a potentially lucrative career, since the 18th and 19th centuries in America, the architecture of the college was transformed into a State apparatus. The essay is a synthesis of a larger publication work on student housing history. It offers a summarized genealogy of this typology which in the history of Western education has been fundamental in shaping university life and the student's invention as a subject.