Over the last few years, many colleges and universities have adopted online roommate matching programs that help incoming students look for and select their own first-year roommates. Like dating sites, the roommate analytics systems can match people based on preferences like music volume, sociability and even tolerance for snoring.
But schools are not offering first-year students roommate personalization engines merely to ease their transition to college life, as I noted in my article for Sunday Business this week. These educational institutions are trying to reduce an expensive problem: roommate conflicts so severe that they can prompt students to transfer or drop out before their sophomore year.
Rona Skinner, the director of business strategies for student auxiliary services at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y., for instance, said she had seen roommates develop conflicts over issues like overnight guests and even whether their dorm room windows should be kept open or closed.
To try to preclude those types of problems, the university uses StarRez, a comprehensive online housing management program that includes a roommate self-selection option for students.
“In today’s market, we have to be competitive inside and outside the academic arena,” Ms. Skinner said. “If we can give students a happy experience with a roommate, they are likely to be retained, not just at the school, but in on-campus housing.”
A start-up, Roompact, is trying to tackle college roommate conflicts directly.
The company has developed online roommate agreements that incoming college students can use to agree on parameters for dorm room cleanliness, security, property sharing and other issues. Then Roompact sends each student a text message on a weekly or twice-monthly basis asking for a rating of how the roommate relationship is going.
The Roompact system also allows university staff members to track the roommate relationship in each dorm room and notifies them when a problem seems to be developing.
“Today, a residence hall director who is in charge of a whole building might find out there’s a problem after a student has already been fighting with a roommate for two months,” said Matt Unger, the chief executive of Roompact. “We want to detect conflict earlier, notify folks in residential life and help with conflict resolution.”
This fall, the University of Hartford in West Hartford, Conn., plans to introduce Roompact for its incoming class, which includes about 1,200 residential students.
The university already had its own strategy in place to try to mitigate roommate conflict. It used paper-based roommate agreements for students and assigned university staff members, like residence counselors, to regularly check in with each student.
While that oversight will continue, Shawn McQuillan, the university’s associate director for residential life, said he hoped features like the regular text messages from Roompact seeking updates will encourage students to better communicate their roommate situations to the university.
“With students becoming more high-tech, it was like pulling teeth to try to get them to fill out the paper forms,” Mr. McQuillan said. “For students who don’t communicate much with us directly, we’re hoping they are going to be more honest with the text messages.”