Co-Ed Dorm Rooms Are Not a Big Deal

Shane Le Master

Before coming to college, Ialways had dreams of being able to share a dorm with a good friend and be able to share in my freshman experiences with them. However, as it turns out, my only friends that ended up coming to Tech with me were girls. I honestly see nothing wrong about rooming with a girl. However, through looking at the options posted on their housing website, Georgia Tech obviously doesn’t see eye to eye with me on that. They offer no co-ed rooms anywhere on campus. The best the school offers are resident halls that are co-ed by floor. The school needs to open their minds and realize that students are responsible enough to room with the opposite sex and that a lot of the time the relationship between such students is no more than innocent friendship. Letting boys and girls share a room together will do nothing to inhibit learning nor will it encourage them to take part in any elicit activities.

Many of the more reputable schools in the country, such as Stanford, NYU, and The University of Chicago have already begun implementing a gender –neutral room policies in recent years and/or a co-ed dorm room option. A gender-neutral housing policy entails not even looking at the gender of the students when assigning rooms in many of their dorm buildings. And by looking at blogs and at this USA Today article, many students say it is really no big deal at all. An already good school like Tech ought to look to these other great institutions as an example. These schools are centers of academics in America and they have shown through experience that coed-rooms, when it comes down to it, have done nothing to tarnish the schools’ reputations or the performance of their students.

Letting boys and girls room together will not cause the whole school to erupt in flames and spell imminent destruction for the institution. I would have really enjoyed being able to room with a close friend this year instead of some random person who I still have been unable to make a connection with. Being with a friend, especially in the same major as me, would have helped me to perform better academically and make me more socially active on campus. However, because my friends are girls and because the school is still stuck in an old-fashioned and rather ignorant mind set, I was unable to have the dorm experience I had hoped for.