Photo courtesy of MIT

At least a portion of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology will return to campus in the fall, the university announced Wednesday, joining Boston University in deciding to return, at least in part, to on-campus learning.

Both universities’ decisions still leave significant uncertainty for landlords who rent apartments to the nearly 43 percent of area college students who neither live in school-provided housing nor at home with parents or relatives.

With most colleges’ and universities’ fall semester plans still in flux and many renters electing to stay put, the Boston multifamily housing market has been thrown into turmoil. The average Greater Boston asking rent declined on a month-over-month basis in April and May, according to Yardi Matrix, and is expected to decline by as much as 1.4 percent over the course of 2020.

MIT President Rafael Reif told students, faculty and staff in a letter Wednesday that the school might bring up to 60 percent of its undergraduates back for fall classes “but likely much lower.” The rest of the undergraduate student body will learn remotely for some or all of the semester. The school, however, will give priority to graduate students whose work depends on access to the campus’ labs, over undergraduates, Reif said, and the school plans to start its fall semester early, on Sept 1, and end in-person instruction when students leave for the Thanksgiving break. Nearly all the school’s 4,547 undergraduates live on-campus, according to university figures, but only about 2,500 of the nearly 7,000 graduate students do.

MIT is charting a path similar to one laid out by BU earlier this month. That school is allowing all undergraduate students the choice of remote or on-campus learning, while its graduate students will be taught under a combined remote/in-person system intended to allow more physical distancing in classrooms and on campus to comply with potential state regulations. A little over 25 percent of the school’s roughly 17,500 undergraduate students live off-campus, and around one-third of the school’s roughly 15,000 graduate students do so, as well.

According to city of Boston data from the 2017-2018 academic year, the most recent for which data is available, the largest contributors to the area’s demand for private, off-campus housing are Northeastern University (6,209 undergraduate students living off-campus), UMass Boston (6,133 students), Boston University (4,448 students), Berklee College of Music (3,223 students), Suffolk University (1,905 students) and Boston College (1,330 students). Of these schools, only Boston University has announced its plans for the fall semester, with others committing to releasing more information in the coming days.