Matchmaker, Matchmaker, Find Me a Roommate

Blind dates can go awry, but a roommate mismatch can spoil a semester. Nasty habits. Bitter grudges. Epic stand-offs over square inches.

Luckily, most pairings don’t get that ugly, whether campuses make them randomly or by running survey responses through a computer. These days many students even control their own fates: More and more colleges let them post profiles, online-dating style, and pick one another.

Yet a handful of institutions insist on hand-matching freshmen, one by one. The goal is for roommates, even if they don’t become best friends forever, to at least get along, says Carolyn S. Bigler, assistant director of housing at the University of Richmond and a hand-matcher. She hopes that students come away from their first anxious chat thinking, “Well, maybe this is going to be OK.”

Tiffannie Williams did. The freshman from Florida hit it off last month with the roommate Richmond had chosen for her: Faith Lewandowski, a Long Islander. Both like to swim and mock their mothers’ devotion to Amway. After moving in, they went to Wal-Mart to stock up on snacks, each picking out Fruit Gushers and white cheddar Cheez-Its.

“Everything is kind of compatible,” says Ms. Lewandowski.

Richmond used to rely on Scantron forms to match roommates. In 2002, Ms. Bigler added an extra page — an open-ended question that asked, basically, What are you looking for? — to the housing application. Soon after, she eliminated the fill-in bubbles, asking each freshman to write out the whole form and mail it in. Students get more invested in the process, she says, when they know a human is behind it.

Housing officers on hand-matching campuses toil for weeks, steeped in human drama: passions, pet peeves, allergies. There’s no substitute, they say, for personal attention. Campus tour guides parrot that point, selling all but a satisfaction guarantee. And parents pay particular attention, lest their kid wind up with a wacko.

Richmond’s ever-evolving form now asks 15 questions about habits and preferences, like daily naps and reality TV. Its last page, still the open-ended question, tries to loosen up the admissions-weary: “This is not an essay! Be casual.” Some students draw pictures.

Ms. Bigler splits applicants by attitudes toward alcohol and overnight guests. Opposite answers to those questions are deal breakers, she says. From there she divides the stacks into smaller and smaller piles, perusing their back pages.

This year, among 750 freshmen, one woman described her passion for Japanese anime comics, says Michael J. Gaynor, a junior who helped with the process. The reference rang a bell, and he riffled through the piles — anime, anime — to find the other fan. At another point, he says, “I had a stack of about 10 people who put, ‘Has to like Obama.’”

The puzzle pieces change throughout the summer. Students withdraw, enroll from the wait list, and elect living-and-learning programs. But Richmond keeps trying to pair — not push — them together.

“We really want the room to be a place that students are comfortable to go back to,” says Ms. Bigler. “Then the other things that they’re faced with in coming to college they’re able to handle much better.”

Several small campuses boast a similar brand of social engineering. Davidson College bases its matches on personality tests and admissions files, considering nuances like the extent of a family’s travel abroad. Housing staffers at Wisconsin Lutheran College consult with admissions officers. At D’Youville College they involve upperclassmen who have led freshmen through an early orientation.

The personal touch still rules even at one much bigger place: Ohio State University. Each year Toni L. Greenslade-Smith, director of housing assignments there, spreads 7,000 roommate forms across the floor and sorts them by hand. Among students’ many other characteristics, she says, “we also look at whether they snore.”

Different colleges’ forms feature multiple-choice questions, fill-in-the-blanks, and 10-point, self-rated scales of modesty and humor. Housing officers regularly fine-tune their questionnaires, often with students’ input, but worry that asking too much will heighten expectations of a perfect match.

In the end, pairing happens by hunch and whim. Once or twice Ms. Bigler has matched two roommates whose forms seemed to have been filled out by their parents. “When you’ve read enough,” she says, “you know.” This year Mr. Gaynor weighed not only what students wrote, but also how. “I found the scribblers would work well together most of the time,” he says.

Staff members at Houghton College, a small, Christian institution, studied three years’ worth of forms and outcomes, concluding that shared taste in music best predicted success for women. For men, it was “spiritual sensitivity.” Also: “People who listed themselves as artistic had roommate problems no matter where we put them,” says Dennis J. Stack, housing director at Houghton.

Everyone’s heard horror stories: the roommate who sliced off the top of her finger and saved it in a drawer, the young woman who chewed tobacco and kept several spittoons around the room.

Catastrophe is clear; gauging success is trickier. Some colleges track room transfers — Richmond’s rate hovers around 1 percent — but figures don’t always account for dropouts, circumstantial splits, and roommates who coexist in steely silence.

Staying power, though — that’s something. By tradition, Richmond’s women’s college serves a steak dinner to roommates who live together till they graduate. Last year 50 women joined in Newlywed Game activities at the wine-and-sundress affair.

Among them were Christa Queen-Sutherland and Katie Donovan, who shared a room except during Ms. Donovan’s semester in Argentina. They both recall a smooth transition to college and a happy four years.

They also remember filling out their housing forms, hoping to be neat and pretending (for their parents) that they didn’t drink. “We both,” says Ms. Queen-Sutherland, “kind of tweaked our applications from the total truth.”