The case for being randomly assigned a roommate in college
Download mp3 (11.89 MB)As soon-to-be college kids around the country are choosing their colleges, they're also potentially choosing their roommates.
Sometimes roommates end up becoming great friends when they're randomly assigned by the school. But there are certainly college roommate horror stories out there that, usually, young people learn from.
However, Pamela Paul says more and more often these days, students are not getting randomly assigned a college roommate. They’re choosing them ahead of time.
Paul, an opinion columnist for the New York Times, thinks there’s something lost in that. The Show spoke with her about it.
Conversation highlights
What are the new ways colleges match roommates?
PAMELA PAUL: Today, there is a range. So there are some schools that have decided to continue doing the same process that was in place when I went to college, which was in the early '90s, which is to say it's not entirely random. They do have everyone fill out a form — and they did when I was going to school as well. Just to give some basics. Are you a neat person, a messy person, smoker, non-smoker, morning person, night owl? That kind of thing. And a lot of schools continue to do that. Some of them will use now a software program to help process the answers and try to find people who might be good matches based on those characteristics. So fairly random. And then others will do a kind of bespoke matching, where they really are trying to mix things up and expose first-year students to a wide variety of backgrounds to people who really might not necessarily be like them.
It sounds like a lot of kids today get to choose their own roommate, though. And there are various ways of going about that.
PAUL: Right. So, there are those old-timey process schools. But now ... and this has really been growing over the past two decades, but really significantly over the last decade, is the ability to choose your own roommate. So, of course, there are a bunch of tech startups that run systems where, you know, you go online like StarRez, you know, these sort of roommate searching, roommate surfing programs. It's kind of like match.com. And you put in your school and then you can scroll through profiles and really find someone and self-match that way. So that's a kind of one version of it.
And then a number of schools have created their own proprietary ways to do this, their own version of, of a matching service. And then there are also informal ways to pre-match. And that's really popular, too, which is nowadays, once you get into school, it's kind of the first thing that goes up on your social media profile and kids start networking before they go to college, right? And sometimes they've met one another during the admissions process. And then even after they're all admitted, a lot of schools now have admitted student days where kids might meet one another in person and decide that they want to become roommates.
So you have a lot of self-selection. And I don't think any schools have gone entirely to that system, which would be really unfair because not everyone can go to those meetings, not everyone is necessarily on social media. And then of course, what about the kids that don't get picked? But even if only half, or say 80% of the students are doing that, it really has a significant impact not only on the kids who are picking their roommates, but also on the class as a whole.
You argue that this is not the best way to go about this, that there's something lost in it.
PAUL: Yeah. I mean, look, it is so hard to get into college these days. It's such a long and arduous process. And then even once you're in school to get into classes, to get into extracurriculars, everything is a competition, everything is a kind of selection process and so this really fits in with that. But let's think about the kids who don't choose their roommates and get to school and find out that most of the kids on their hall already know their roommates, they already know each other.
So they're all matched up. And here you are, you know, having chosen someone random, maybe someone that you're not necessarily going to be best buddies with. And when you go out, you know, into the campus world and try to meet people, you find everyone is already weirdly paired up. And there's already, as I said, a lot of pre-socializing, a lot of pre-connecting before kids get to campus. So it's very different from the days when you used to arrive at school and nobody knew anyone, right. And we were all unequal. And we already know that kids today are often, you know, socializing on screens as opposed to in real life.
Well, if they've already kind of found their people, there's a lot less incentive to be out there to have that kind of campus atmosphere of everyone really being in this new situation together. So that's the kind of big-picture loss.
But I also think there is a real downside to choosing your own roommate because kids already are so sort of risk averse. So, you know, sort of self-selecting their own little groups and hunker down. And we kind of see that, right, in the ways in which campuses can often be not totally itemized, but really kind of grouped together, it becomes very cliquey. You're sort of eliminating that whole process of exploration if you've already decided who you're going to live with.
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