Roommate Matching

Most residential colleges in the United States have some sort of official process for roommate matching in place. In the Association of College and University Housing Officers–International’s 2018–19 survey, 56% of respondents said their institution has incoming freshmen fill out a questionnaire to determine dorm assignments. Another 34% said their school asks new students to create a profile on the college’s virtual roommate-matching platform, some of which let students match themselves, some of which don’t. And while the most common criteria schools used to pair students were personal habits (such as cleanliness and smoking status), slightly more than 1/2 of the survey’s respondents reported considering characteristics such as academic interests and hobbies. Some colleges are so meticulous, they have incoming students take personality tests. Some colleges have for decades incorporated into its freshman-roommate assignments each student’s personality traits as determined by the Myers-Briggs test—especially where the individual falls on the extroversion-introversion scale.

Many schools give students the option to request a specific roommate in advance, and consider those requests on a case-by-case basis. But some schools have recently stopped allowing student input on the process. For example, in 2013, NYU stopped allowing first-year students to choose their roommates in order to mix people from different parts of the country and the world. (NYU’s current policy says the university will consider but not guarantee students’ preferences.) Last year, Colgate University, a liberal-arts college in upstate New York, similarly stopped letting incoming freshmen pre-select their living buddies. Some schools, such as Tufts University and Duke University, now randomly assign roommates to incoming freshmen.

Many incoming freshmen, understandably, want to choose their own roommates. But the common practice of students sorting themselves on social media is regarded skeptically by some student-affairs administrators. There is a limitation to [what you can learn by] looking at Facebook, looking at profiles, looking at posts.

And the roommates students want might not always be the best roommates for them, in schools’ eyes. 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, he went on. But as campus administrators have long argued, people (ought to) attend college not only to get a degree, but also to transcend their comfort zone—by engaging with people, disciplines, and ideas that diverge from what they are used to.

Roommate assignments are a high-stakes endeavor, given how important that relationship can end up being. The bond can be so tight, one study found, that the two students—if they’re friendly—tend to adopt each other’s speech patterns. Even roommates who aren’t super close can have a profound influence on each other, if only because of how much time they spend together: While only 37% of the student participants in a 2006 study identified their roommate as their “best friend,” close to half of the respondents said they spent more time with their roommate than with any other friend. An immense body of research demonstrates the impact a student’s living buddy can have on that student’s grades, career choice, beliefs, and social habits (such as drinking behavior).

These stakes are a big reason colleges put so much stock into the roommate-matching process. Schools have an interest in ensuring that students thrive, and whom a freshman lives with can have an immense impact on her long-term success in college and beyond. As Sacerdote alluded to, a peer who on paper may seem appealing to a roommate-seeking freshman may not end up being the best match for that freshman—or may be so similar that living with her undermines the freshman’s ability to experience new things in college.

It’s hard to suss out how students’ satisfaction with college-assigned roommates stacks up against their satisfaction with self-selected ones, because apples-to-apples data don’t exist. But statistics from individual schools that are more hands-on with roommate matching indicate, at the very least, that most students are satisfied with their roommates, even when they don’t get to pick. Students at Northwestern and Davidson, for example, generally seem to buy into their college’s roommate-matching strategy, with an estimated one in 10 incoming freshmen at each school opting to request a dorm buddy. At Davidson, the majority of students go on to live with their freshmen roommates as upperclassmen, according to Jason Shaffer, the college’s associate dean of students.And in a survey conducted by the research firm Skyfactor during the 2015–16 school year among 20,000 students at 15 participating institutions with varying roommate-assignment protocols, more than half of the respondents said they were happy with the roommate to whom they were assigned as a freshman; just one in 10 of them requested a roommate change that year.