Who will it be?
From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com
September song: Many college freshmen (or is it freshpersons or first-year students?) are understandably nervous about rooming with people they never knew before. But there’s much to be said for many colleges’ policy of not letting them choose dorm roommates their first year. Rather, these schools diversify dorm and room assignments to encourage students to get to know people with very different backgrounds. They strive to mix it up. The idea is to promote American higher education’s democratic mission of expanding students’ understanding of the wider society. Without the mixing policy, most rich preppy kids might mostly just choose to room with rich preppy kids, jocks with jocks, people of the same ethnicity with people who look like them, and so on, at least in the first year.
The dorm-diversification approach seems to work pretty well, with polls showing that college students appreciate learning about the experiences and perspectives of people who perhaps have had lives beyond their imaginations. Many choose to stay roommates of those whom their colleges had initially chosen for them. The research firm Skyfactor found in a 2015-2016 school-year survey of 20,000 students at 15 institutions that more than half were content with the first-year roommates the college had assigned them and only 10 percent asked for a roommate replacement that year.
Economist Bruce Sacerdote wrote last year: “Natural instincts do not always benefit us in the long run….As human beings we naturally gravitate towards our comfort zone and find peers who look a lot like ourselves.’’ But we get stronger if we’re put into situations where we connect with people and ideas that we’re not used to.
To read the Skyfactor survey, please hit this link.
http://skyfactor.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/2017-Room-Assignment-Research-Note.pdf]
To read Mr. Sacerdote’s study, please hit this link.
My own college roommate experience was fairly varied – for that less “diverse’’ time. I roomed one year with a “Latin lover’’ (from Venezuela) who “sexiled’’ me as he spent many nights with girlfriends in our room, forcing me to seek other accommodations. Others included two future physicians, one whose father was an AT&T executive, the other whose father was quartermaster general of the Marines. Then there was the plainspoken fellow from a small New Hampshire town, another from a small Illinois town and a Norwegian (in my fraternity, where I lived during my junior year). I learned something from all of them, though the only one I’ve kept in fairly frequent contact is one of the physicians, now a cancer surgeon in New York about to retire.
I am grateful that none of my roommates were heavy drinkers, well not after freshman year. They learned.
