Here’s a bright spot in all the housingmarket gloom and doom: college communities. Town-and-gown spots like Austin, Texas; Charlottesville, Va., and Madison, Wis., have long been heralded as great places to live and retire because of their proximity to good health care, cultural events, steady employment and smart people. For all those reasons—and a healthy mix of demographics—their real-estate values are more stable than those of comparable towns without schools.

“Activity around college campuses will really hold up, better than the market as a whole,” says Walter Molony, a spokesman for the National Association of Realtors. “It’s driven by supply and demand.” College enrollment has been growing twice as fast as the general population, and more students are taking five years to graduate. Juxtapose that wave with the supply of aging and “barracks-like” dorms, and you have a great niche for investment, says Michael Dowd of Millennium Credit Markets, a Boston firm that arranges financing for privately owned dorm buildings.

Parents of students who can afford to invest while paying those hefty tuition bills can buy a home or condo in town when their child enters school. They can even pay their son or daughter to manage the place for them by bringing in roommates and collecting rent. That strategy can provide tax savings as well as the possibility of profits when the home is sold shortly after graduation.

If you’d rather not be that hands-on, consider one of these two real-estate investment trusts: Education Realty Trust (EDR) and American Campus C (ACC). Both invest strictly in private student housing, and both trade like stocks, so you can buy and sell them through any broker. And let somebody else worry about the beer parties.