Students Turn to Online Roommate Matching Services to Avoid Getting Paired With a Stranger
By ISAAC ARNSDORF, Wall Street Journal - August 5, 2010
As soon as he received his roommate assignment in the mail, Sam Brown did what any 17-year-old about to enter college would do: He looked him up on Facebook.
When Sam, who will be attending the University of Colorado at Boulder, couldn't find him, he turned to Google Earth. By searching the address the college provided, Sam could see aerial photos of his future roommate's house in Encino, Calif.—his lawn, his basketball hoop, the cars in his driveway, his pool.
![[roomates]](http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/PJ-AW308_roomat_G_20100804190910.jpg)
Photos: Andrew Spear for The Wall Street JournalThis online scouting—and the judgments students make based on what they see—are dramatically changing the time-honored college practice of learning to live with a stranger freshman year.
Isaac Arnsdorf discusses several sites that help incoming college freshman find suitable roommates by matching them with other students who have similar preferences.
Many schools see assigned roommates as a chance for students to learn to get along with different types of people as they're forced to negotiate everything from who gets the top bunk to varying ideas about politics and religion. And many student deans and admissions officers view online roommate screening as a threat to all that.
Droves of parents have been calling to complain to colleges and universities, often demanding to change their children's roommates based on information discovered online. Schools generally will not change room assignments, aside from rare exceptions for issues of safety, says Greg Victory, who oversees freshman orientation at Syracuse University. A student with severe asthma, for example, would not be required to live with a chain-smoker.
Other colleges, though, are rethinking their approach to freshman housing for a generation that uses friend as a verb.
"We decided that rather than continue to fight against the social media that is so much a part of our students' lives, we need to get engaged in that social media," says TJ Logan, associate director of housing at the University of Florida.
This summer, for the first time, incoming UF students could use a Facebook application called RoomBug to connect with others seeking roommates, letting them gauge each other's neatness, sleep schedules and other cohabitation essentials, as well as general interests. Students who found a match could then request to room together.
More than a quarter of the 5,179 incoming freshmen who will live on campus have signed up, Mr. Logan says. While the final data won't be available until all the rooms are assigned, he expects more mutually requested roommates than in the past.
Erica Steele, an 18-year-old from Dayton, Ohio, who is about to be a freshman at Bowling Green State University, says she signed onto a website that promises to gauge students' compatibility as roommates, URoomSurf, because she was nervous about living with a stranger. She met Katelyn DeVore, 18, of Van Buren, Ohio, who was 95% compatible based on the website's survey, which asks about neatness, hygiene and sleep cycle as well as politics, religion and sexual orientation. The women agreed to live together, but not before they also met in person.
"I didn't want to get to school and not know anyone," Erica says. "And it's great because we can color-coordinate the dorm."
Since students are checking out their assigned roommates on Facebook anyway—and often not liking what they see—it makes sense for colleges to use Facebook as a tool instead, says Robert Castellucci, co-founder of RoomBug, which, besides UF, is also active at Emory University in Atlanta, Temple University in Philadelphia, Wichita State University in Kansas, and William Paterson University of New Jersey. While diversity is important, he says, it doesn't always work if it's forced. "I personally want my home where I live day-to-day to be my sanctuary," Mr. Castellucci says.
Syracuse University, where roommates are assigned at random, deliberately sends out its roommate notices electronically at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon so that people have the weekend to cool off before they call to complain, Mr. Victory says.
"Now that it's so easy to make judgments about everything from sexual orientation to musical taste, there's more opportunity for students to say 'I'm not going to like this person' without ever having a conversation," Mr. Victory says.
The official policy at Syracuse, whose website warns incoming students against making assumptions based on online profiles, prohibits reassigning roommates during the summer.
Schools handle freshman housing differently, but many use a simple questionnaire—smoker or non-smoker? night owl or early riser?—and a computer program that automatically optimizes the matches. Most colleges allow students who already know each other to live together if they both request it.
URoomSurf has capitalized on that request process. More than 83,000 students at 775 U.S. schools have logged onto the online community, where they can create profiles, fill out a survey and view their matches. Roommates who find each other on URoomSurf can mutually request to live together like anyone else with a preexisting friendship.
Jordan Benudiz of Encino, Calif.
Sam Brown of Boulder, Colo., used Facebook and Google Earth to learn about his future freshman roommate, Mr. Benudiz. They're attending the University of Colorado at Boulder in the fall.
All incoming students at Missouri State University are using roommate-matching website, RoommateClick, for the first time this year. "Students nowadays want to know as much and have as much control as possible," says Lenord McGownd, Missouri State's assistant director of residence life.
How students represent themselves online gives an accurate portrait of what they're really like, according to a 2010 study published in the journal Psychological Science. It looked at 236 college-aged people's Facebook profiles and used five personality dimensions to compare how individuals identified themselves, how four of their friends identified them, and how 10 researchers identified them based on their profiles.
Still, using Facebook doesn't necessarily lead to more successful roommate matches, since what people think they want in a roommate is often not what ends up making them happiest, says University of Texas psychology professor Sam Gosling, one of the researchers. For example, two neat-freaks may clash over who decides what goes where. On the flip side, Tom Congoran, now 23 and a real estate agent in Boston, arrived at Arizona State University as a hippie from New Hampshire and discovered that his roommate was a neat Republican business major. They're still good friends.
Larry Davis, associate residence life director at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, says the school has discussed having roommates connect on social media, but has hesitated for fear that racial, religious and sexual minorities might be singled out or excluded.
"This is an institution of higher learning, and we expect [students] to learn and think," Mr. Davis says, "and taking on a random roommate is a good experience to have."
Sam checks out Jordan's Facebook profile.
Even when students pick their own roommates, Mr. Logan of the University of Florida notes, they don't pick their entire hallways or entire floors, so they'll still meet people from different backgrounds.
College officials note that the vast majority of assigned roommates get along fine.
And, in all likelihood, so will Sam and his roommate. Weeks after Sam looked him up on Google Earth, Jordan Benudiz, 18, replied to Sam's email. He'd shortened his last name on Facebook, which was why Sam couldn't find him. The roommates-to-be didn't share much about themselves. Instead, they directed each other to their respective Facebook profiles.
"It was a tremendous help because I got to know him on a virtual level, so to speak," Jordan says. "We've done everything except for actually talk."
Based on what they saw on Facebook, both Sam and Jordan say they think they'll get along: They both like sports and reading. "I could have requested to live with a close friend," Sam says, "but I wanted to branch out. That's what college is about."
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