Meet your new roommate!
Why a growing number of U.S. universities are offering co-ed rooms
Most schools introduced the couples option in the past three or four years. So far, relatively few students are taking part. At the University of Pennsylvania, which began offering coed rooms in 2005, about 120 out of 10,400 students took advantage of the option this year.
At UC Riverside, which has approximately 6,000 students in campus housing, about 50 have roommates of the opposite sex. The school has had the option since 2005.
Garcia and Youngdahl live in a house for students with an interest in Russian studies. They said they were already friendly, and didn’t think they would be compatible with some of the other people in the house. “I had just roomed with a boy. I was under the impression at the time that girls were a little bit neater and more quiet,” Youngdahl said.
Parents aren’t necessarily thrilled with boy-girl housing. Debbie Feldman’s 20-year-old daughter, Samantha, is a sophomore at Oberlin in Ohio and plans to room with her platonic friend Grey Castro, a straight guy, next year. Feldman said she was shocked when her daughter told her. “When you have a male and female sharing such close quarters, I think it’s somewhat delusional to think there won’t be sexual tension,” the 52-year-old Feldman said. “Maybe this generation feels more comfortable walking around in their underwear. I’m not sure that’s a good thing.”
Still, Feldman said her daughter is partly in college to learn life lessons, and it’s her decision. Samantha said she assured her mom she thinks of Castro as a brother. “I’m really close to him, and I consider him one of my really good friends,” she said. “I really trust him. That trust makes it work.”
-with a report from CP
page 1 page 2
I am not opposed to the thought of people choosing to share a room with a member of the opposite sex. However I would NEVER feel comfortable doing so, unless maybe I had known the guy for my entire life. I don’t think universities should just randomnly put two strangers together who are of a different sex. Living witha roomate will be uncomfortable enough. Living with one of a different sex would be just plain weird.
Having to walk across the hall or up a floor to have sex was such a burden that no one was doing it when I showed up at college a decade ago. The floor below started out as the Virgin Vault. Not by the end of the year. Crap, kids, it’s a little too late to be worrying about sex on college campuses. Just press the issue and try to make sure we don’t all get pregnant and the clap.
They’re only formalizing what was an informal arrangement when I was a dorm rat in the mid-80s. It’s not really anything new.
[...] az ellenkező nemű hallgatók költözzenek közös kollégiumi szobába. A macleans.ca oldal alaposan körüljárja a kérdést, amelyben kiderül, egész komoly mozgalma [...]