Loud music blaring, wild parties that last into the wee hours, dirty clothes and old pizza toppings scattered all over a cramped living space. Anyone who’s ever recoiled from roommate-inflicted indignities such as these has no doubt wondered, “How in the heck did they pick this person to live with me?”
Pairing roommates, university administrators admit, is more an art than a science, and even matches that look good on paper can go terribly wrong. Over the years, however, housing folks have tried to refine the picking process and even taken it into a brave new high-tech realm. But even the best roommate-matching systems have their limits.
“I would be lying if I didn’t say that we make some matches that are right there on the cusp,” says Mark D’Arienzo, the associate director of university housing administration at Northwestern University. “We don’t control who’s admitted.”
“Personally, I look at it as a crapshoot,” says Guy Gerbick, who’s logged more than 20 years in residential life at various schools and is now dean of residential life at Harvey Mudd College in California. “It’s hit or miss whether it works or not.”
Though colleges take a wide variety of approaches — the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign only takes a few factors into account before letting a homegrown computer program match students, while Harvey Mudd’s housing staff sorts through lengthy forms submitted by incoming students before deciding on pairings — most schools have begun moving at least part of the process to the Internet.
At Northwestern, for instance, students can now go online to fill out forms that ask them about their habits, likes and dislikes, a process that administrators say makes the process much easier on housing staff — not to mention budgets.
A dozen schools, including Emory University in Atlanta, have subcontracted the roommate selection process to WebRoomz, a new offshoot of a firm that builds and manages privately owned university housing. Charging the university a fee based on the number of “beds” to be managed, WebRoomz creates customized Web pages that allow incoming students to surf around and find potential roommates all by themselves.
The roommate-match computer site “looks like any other official school screen,” says Jessica Harrison, a spokeswoman for WebRoomz, which is based in Atlanta. “We encourage each school to have a focus group of students [help refine the forms] so they can come up with questions that are appropriate for that school.”
WebRoomz forms usually cover the basics — smoking, musical tastes, study habits, neatness or lack thereof — and once all the questions have been answered by an incoming student, a computer program displays a list of other students whose habits and preferences match theirs, starting with the most compatible potential roommates. Using screen names that they choose themselves, students then can e-mail other incoming freshmen to find out more about them; if both parties agree to be roommates, WebRoomz will lock in that choice for them.
Students can also declare a preference for a certain dorm, or they can build a customized search that allows them to search for potential roommates based on only a few criteria. “That function allows someone to say, ‘I don’t care about the rest, really just want a roommate who doesn’t smoke, goes to bed early and likes to ride bikes,'” Harrison says.
Having so much choice at their fingertips is addictive for some kids, who end up changing their minds — and their roommates — several times before the deadline for finding a dorm-mate arrives. “They get a little slap-happy,” says Harrison, who adds that the most active time on the roommate-search sites is between midnight and 2 a.m.
Harrison says one college administrator attributed a drop in requests for new roommates from 10 percent to 1 percent to the WebRoomz system, but D’Arienzo says he has yet to see a computer-based matching system that works as well as human beings who read all the forms personally.
There’s still a lot of paper involved for D’Arienzo and his staff, who print out all the forms that incoming students submit. This year, he says, Northwestern had an incoming class of almost 2,000 freshmen, and of that group, a percentage of students was shunted off into 11 “houses” that aren’t part of the roommate-match system. Once those students are out of the pool, D’Arienzo and his team sort students by gender, then by whether they smoke, and then they create piles based on the dorms students want to live in.
“In an ideal world, the exact number of people who want to live in each building would match the number of rooms available,” he says. “But it’s not exactly perfect, and you have to start making compromises — you can’t have everybody in one building from New Jersey.”
Though it now allows students to fill out housing applications online, the University of Illinois’ flagship campus keeps thing pretty simple for the 4,000-5,000 incoming freshmen who’ll be living in university housing. Students are sorted by only a few factors: gender, age, smoking status and what they’ll be studying at the university. They are then matched by a computer program the university developed.
One concern that Illinois housing director Jack Collins has about services such as WebRoomz is their ability to allow students to “self-select” roommates to whom they are similar. “My first college roommate was from a river town in West Virginia — his background was very different from mine,” he notes. “I think it’s important that everyone have an opportunity to live around people who are different from themselves.”
Diversity is always a goal for housing administrators, though Gerbick says placing an observant Orthodox Jew with someone who “thinks religion is stupid” is asking for trouble. “We do go more for comfort than for challenge” when placing roommates together, he notes.
There are some kinds of “differences” that students will go to any length to avoid. The Harvey Mudd form asks students, “What could you absolutely not stand in a roommate?” Lately Gerbick says, lots of incoming freshman have said emphatically that they don’t want a roommate who “smelly.”
So, he wonders with a laugh, “How do you ask someone if they stink?”
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Mix and match
Here’s a snapshot of how three colleges try to match roommates:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Number of freshmen in university housing: 4,000-5,000
Length of housing application: 2 pages
The sorting: Students are sorted by age, gender, smoking status and what subjects they’re studying, then a computer program takes over and puts students together.
Sample question from housing form: Do you have any medical conditions that require special accommodations?
Northwestern University, Evanston
Number of freshmen in university housing: 1,975
Length of housing application: 3 pages
The sorting: Students are sorted first by gender, smoking status, dorm preferences, then the housing staff takes other factors (sleep habits, neatness, etc.) into account.
Sample question from housing form: How do you feel about visitors to your room?
(Check all that apply)
1. Overnight guests OK
2. Daytime guests OK
3. Evening guests OK
Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, Calif.
Number of freshmen in university housing: 191
Length of housing application: 4 pages
The sorting: Students are sorted by gender, then the housing staff matches freshmen based on answers to the roommate-match form.
Sample question from housing form: Circle a question closest to your view.
When people see my room, they think:
Do pigs live here?
Do people live here?
