For many adults, the first and last time they willingly submit to living with a total stranger is their freshman year of college. And now is the time of year when many kids, just accepted into college, decide they won’t do it.
Cohabitating with anyone in 150 square feet isn’t easy. It’s hard enough to share a room with someone you love. Their intermittent snores, the way they hum while cleaning or just miss the trash can when flinging dirty tissues.
But forcing kids from widely diverging backgrounds, ethnicities and economic classes to live in close quarters is one of the benefits of a residential college. It’s a social leveler. It offers its own education. It can produce terrible conflict, but that, too, is essential to preparing young people for the world. It’s an important part of learning to get along.
Too many students today miss out on that experience altogether. Though in recent years some schools have pulled back from the practice, many have adopted systems that give students far more control over the process. Students have the option of choosing a roommate on their own, whether they connect in person, on social media or through one of many third-party matching services. Or they use a campus matching service like RoomSync or StarRez, which schools can license and tailor to their needs.
At the University of Arizona, first-year students either pair up on their own or use a program that the administrative director for housing and residential life, Dana Robbins-Murray, described as “Match.com for roommates.”
“This gives students the control over who they live with and where they live,” Robbins-Murray told me. “We find it gives them the power to feel more enabled to work through the system because they chose it.”
“The outcome we want is students to have a place that’s safe, comfortable, to feel where they belong,” David Clark, the vice president of campus life at Emory University, told me. Roughly 55 percent of Emory’s students start school paired up, whether they met on social media, at a pre-college meet-up or knew one another from home. Housing assignments aren’t released until July in order to give freshmen plenty of time to find someone.
Choice. Control. Comfort. Agency. These sound like good things: qualities that might promote a sense of happiness and safety.
But they can also undermine other values and abilities, such as resilience, risk-taking, navigating differences across identity and ideology. It’s one thing for schools to keep night owls away from morning people and avoid clashes over allergies. But college is about encountering the unknown and learning to adapt, even if that means sidestepping a grievously drunk roommate at 3 a.m. Freshman year is when the girl who grew up with a private chef lives with someone whose rare meal out was at IHOP.
The idea that letting kids pair up on their own to improve mental health doesn’t necessarily bear out in the long run.
“Roommate experiences are an intense learning experience,” Molly Newton, the senior associate dean of students at Bates College, told me. “They’re fun and they’re hard.” Bates does not allow students to preselect roommates; instead, administrators handle the matching process themselves.
“College is meant to be a time of life when you step out of your comfort zone and you’re stretched,” says Julie Lythcott-Haims, the author of “Your Turn: How to Be an Adult” and a former dean of first-year students at Stanford. “If people are allowed to choose their own roommates, they’re inherently cutting themselves off from some of the most significant learning available, which is to grow up your freshman year with someone not like you.”
The reality is that when kids choose their own roommates, they tend to go with people who are exactly like themselves. Bruce Sacerdote, an economist at Dartmouth College, has been studying the social effects of college roommates for over a decade. His research points to clear advantages to a randomized process, especially since American campuses still see a lot of homophily or self-segregation by race, ethnicity and class.
“Universities work so hard to achieve diversity, but that’s most valuable if people are actually interacting,” Sacerdote told me. “The most powerful tool universities have to foster that is through roommate matches.”
Kids who pair up are often the ones who went to private or elite public feeder schools where they can easily slot in with mutual friends; they’re also the kids who have resources to meet up over the summer. Letting kids choose their own roommates, Lythcott-Haims said, “privileges the privileged, foments cliques and counters the intended outcome of having a diverse student body in that kids learn and grow because of their interactions with each other.”
Recognition of this effect has led some schools, like Duke University, to stop letting first-year students self-select. Even though it’s hard to claw back a privilege that’s already been granted, especially when many colleges treat students more like clients or customers whom they aim to please, now is the time for more colleges to take that step.
After all, with the insular and insulating nature of social media and the emphasis on racial and ethnic identity affinity groups, getting kids out of their bubbles is already an uphill battle.
Today’s divided campuses need students to learn as much as possible about getting along with the kinds of people they don’t know. Kids certainly deserve the chance, too.