Think about a time when you were paired with someone you didn’t know for a group project, a volunteer activity, a room assignment at camp or something similar. What did you learn from and about that person while spending time together? Were there any awkward moments? Did you become friends? Did the experience change you in any way?
If you plan to go to college and live in a dorm, you’ll probably have a roommate, at least for the first year. Would you be open to living with someone you didn’t know? If someone from your hometown, whether a close friend or an acquaintance, were to attend the same school as you, would you ask to room with that person instead of a stranger? Why?
In the Opinion essay “What Is Lost When Freshmen Choose Their Roommates,” Pamela Paul argues that living with a stranger can be good for young people:
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.
While some college administrators say that letting students choose whom they live with allows them to feel more comfortable and safe at school, Ms. Paul argues that it can undermine other values and abilities, such as resilience, risk-taking and navigating differences across identity and ideology:
“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.”
Students, read the entire essay and then tell us:
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Do you think college freshmen should get to choose their roommates? When you weigh the values of comfort, safety and belonging against those of resilience, risk-taking and navigating differences, which are more important for young people to experience in their first year of college? Why?
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How difficult do you find it to step outside your comfort zone when it comes to getting to know new people and possibly becoming friends with them?
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Consider the idea that college students choosing their freshman-year roommate “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.” Do you agree or disagree? Why?
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Do you know anyone who went to college and had a roommate? Did the person choose the roommate? What have you been told about that experience? Was it fun? Difficult? A learning experience? What, if anything, would you do differently as a result of hearing that person’s stories?
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If you’re planning to go to college, do you think you will apply to the same institutions as your friends? What do you think the advantages and disadvantages of that might be? Would you submit a request to live in a dorm room with your friend?
Students 13 and older in the United States and Britain, and 16 and older elsewhere, are invited to comment. All comments are moderated by the Learning Network staff, but please keep in mind that once your comment is accepted, it will be made public and may appear in print.
Find more Student Opinion questions here. Teachers, check out this guide to learn how you can incorporate these prompts into your classroom.