Science of matching college roommates is mostly art, luck
The phone calls begin days after the dorm-room assignments go out to new college freshmen. Kids scour social media sites to learn everything they can about the new roommate the school has matched them with. In some cases, that leads to an immediate complaint to the people in charge of university housing.
“They say, ‘I've looked at my roommate online and they look like a real, well, insert an adjective here, but a loser, and I want a new one,'” says Kirsten Ruby, assistant director of housing for marketing at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “Another interesting trend is that a parent will call and say, ‘Hey, I've looked at my kid's roommate on Facebook and they look like a real, insert an adjective here, but a loser, and I want a new one.'”
Regardless of whether the call comes from a frantic teenager or a hovering parent, the answer is a simple “wait,” Ruby says. “Sometimes these things work out.”
As proof that Ruby is right, my college roommate, his wife and son came to town this month. His 21-year-old college son stayed in our recently flooded basement, taught one of our sons to juggle and had fun with our three younger boys. We went out to eat a couple of times during the weekend. My old roommate invited me and my baseball-loving son to join his son and him at a Cubs game and his wife and my wife went to see “The Help.” We get together at least once a year and always have fun.
The only reason he and I were paired as college roommates is that we were nonsmokers, which, in the days when we went to college, generally meant that neither of us owned a bong.
Other than tar-free lungs and a lack of pot, we didn't have a lot in common. He was a Southerner and a city kid. I was a Hoosier farm boy. He attended an exclusive prep school and traveled around the nation competing in debate competitions. I had to admit that he was the first Jewish person (outside of prayers to Jesus) that I had ever spoken to. He played tennis. I played Indiana sports such as basketball, football and baseball. He was neat to the point of being anal. I was sloppy to the point of being a pain in the rear. He was studious and knew how to achieve his goals. I was in over my head. He was good with money. I needed to beat him in a backgammon game to secure enough change for the Laundromat drier. He's now a big-time banking attorney. I sometimes get to interview guys like him. But we were groomsmen in each other's weddings, have vacationed together, shared joys and sorrows and remain lifelong friends.
Our story is not unusual.
“We say, give it a try. Very often it works out,” says Ruby, who notes that of the 8,500 students who began life together this month in residential housing at the U of I, only about 100 will have conflicts resulting in a change of roommates.
“Every single campus takes a different approach to the attempt to play matchmaker,” says James Baumann, director of communications and marketing for the Association of College and University Housing Officers-International. The U of I matches roommates of the same class year and puts smokers with smokers. Northern Illinois University lets students go online and request a roommate they know or simply “pick where they want to live” and see what stranger happens to make the same choice, says Mike Stang, executive director of housing for the university in Dekalb.
Baumann says a few schools “have a very detailed questionnaire” that tries to refine the process by asking about study habits, neatness, musical tastes, bedtimes or maybe even political and lifestyle views.
“Part of the reason of coming to college is to learn how to get along with someone who isn't just like you,” Ruby says in defense of serendipity.
“Most of our students haven't shared a room with anybody before,” Stang says, agreeing that learning how to get along with strangers is a valuable part of college.
People trying to manipulate a school's system often fail. Baumann says he's heard of students who change their Facebook profiles to “make themselves unflattering” in the unrealistic hope the university will be forced to award them a single room. Parents sometimes take control of the application or hover so closely that a kid proclaims to be a workaholic study freak who gets to bed by 9 and loves quiet time and a lack of social opportunities when that isn't actually true.
Baumann says he's often heard housing directors moan, “Oh, this Facebook thing is going to be the death of me.”
Some complain that a roommate appears to be gay, Ruby says. Sometimes the fears grow from political views or religious affiliations or some other perception gleaned from 30 seconds online. Baumann tells of one freshman who prejudged his roommate simply because he wasn't given an opportunity to prejudge: “This person doesn't even have a Facebook page, so there must be something wrong with him.”
Sometimes the more a person learns from the Internet, whether he's researching a roommate or a political candidate, the more bad information he gathers. And even when people think they know what they want, they can be wrong.
“The most significant roommate disagreements are between people who were friends in high school,” Ruby says.
For all the planning and angst and complaining, “most roommate conflicts can be resolved,” Ruby says, “and they often turn into lifelong friendships.”
That's the reason my old roommate and I can still laugh about the time he put masking tape down the center of our college room.