Incoming freshmen have never seen10/31/2023 ![]() And while the most common criteria schools used to pair students were personal habits (such as cleanliness and smoking status), slightly more than half of the survey’s respondents reported considering characteristics such as academic interests and hobbies. Another 34 percent said their school asks new students to create a profile on the college’s virtual roommate-matching platform, some of which let students match themselves, some of which don’t. In the Association of College and University Housing Officers–International’s 2018–19 survey, 56 percent of respondents said their institution has incoming freshmen fill out a questionnaire to determine dorm assignments. Most residential colleges in the United States have some sort of official process for roommate matching in place. Read: Why universities are phasing out luxury dorms Schools want to maintain careful control over that process so that they can fulfill higher education’s democratic mission at the micro-level of the dorm room. But in recent years, many colleges have started to restrict-if not altogether remove-incoming freshmen’s say in the roommate-matching process. ![]() Many new students join groups online to connect with one another before freshman year, and they submit roommate requests based on the information they glean there. ![]() The advent of social-media platforms such as Facebook in the mid-2000s, some residence-life administrators told me, fueled that impulse. Left to their own devices, many incoming freshmen are inclined to preselect their roommates-and when they do, many opt for peers they already know or to whom they assume they will relate. That duty entails enabling young adults to practice “the fine art of getting along with their fellows,” as Yanni puts it in her book. In recent years, colleges across the country have expressed renewed interest in their democratic mission to build a diverse student body and expose students to their peers from different backgrounds. Reflecting on that brochure today elicits a sense of déjà vu (minus the furnace-tending and log-crackling). Dorms, in turn, emerged as a sort of “social leveler,” Yanni told me. Greek life was effectively promoting socioeconomic and ethnic segregation. They were full of affluent white students, while many poorer students lived in off-campus boarding houses. College deans had begun to worry that fraternities, which rose in popularity toward the end of the 1800s, were undermining the student experience, according to Carla Yanni, a professor of art history at Rutgers University and the author of the new book Living on Campus: An Architectural History of the American Dormitory. The brochure reflected evolving attitudes toward college-student housing at the time. A page in the University of Wisconsin’s 1926 brochure (Image courtesy of the UW-Madison Archives, #S1369)
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