The licensing course and test are a complete joke if youve ever been through anything even remotely academically rigorous and they wont teach you anything.

Turnover might even work in your favor with annual rent increases tied to the academic calendar.

Academic studies both in Europe and US, show the average RE investor underperforms the public equity REITs by 3.5 to 4% per annum, but that's average, and that equity REITs have outperformed the SP500 by 2% over last 50/40/20 years (NAREIT data c1974 onwards) but not in the last 15 yrs, when SP500 has 15.1% annual return since 3/9/09 and has beaten most asset classes. longer term SP500 return is 8.4% nominal and 6.9% Real since 1801. you can do both, but focus your time on the one you love the most if you have a preference as each stock or property requires 50-100 hours of research time typically before pulling the trigger for me, best of luck Kyle

To maximize its appeal, highlight rental performance, market it on investor-focused platforms, and consider selling before the academic year to attract buyers ready to capitalize on rental income.Good luck!

And should I get a degree or any academic qualification to have more experience and knowledge about real estate?

It is very simple.IF and IF the GP uses 30 year financing (just assume this product exist), even with variable rate every 10 year, then this problem never exist.( The very beautiful thing about 30Y fixed rate for residential guaranteed by gov. is that the equity owner is forever in good shape financially ) ...So imo CRE is not speculative, but most investor has no clue to measure and understand the impact of interest rate, cap rate and short term / long term financing and fixed/variable debt.From an academic perspective, I agree with you...CRE should not be speculative but as @Brian Burke pointed out, for conservative operators, there were NO opportunities during this time period because all of the speculative operators bid up the prices to insane levels and they relied on rubes like me to fund this speculative bubble.

With the money and academics potentially pouring into RPI and Troy, NY — Do you think these markets will actually explode in the next 20 years?

Temple now attracts students from more affluent backgrounds in the Philadelphia suburbs (kudo's to the school for raising it's academic reputation).

I suspect that the differences have to do with time of year and/or weather it is legal in the STR city.My STR is  MTR during the academic year which it is easy to smoke outside in the yard during STR season. 

You probably don't have the market for weekly summer rentals plus academic year rental for this to work.