Not pot stirring, still here. Just need more sleep than the rest of you seem to need. 
Ok. I stand corrected about having at least two single sex options.
Easy.
Step 1: enter dorm room
Step 2: close door
Voila. Down time away from boys.
I honestly think a problem is being made where there really isnât one.
Because females werenât allowed in colleges âin the beginning.â They are now. Coed rooms, coed dorms, coed life.
Surw there are reasons to make dorms coed. Many students prefer it, for one thing. Itâs also probably easier logistically in some waysâeasier to adjust to fluctuating numbers and balance various other preferences if you donât have whole buildings that must be male or female.
@mom23g8kids As you can see from many of the posts, several schools have been coed almost entirely since at least the mid-70s.
What Iâm wondering is why the fuss now about them not being coed?
My child actually looks to see that the bathrooms are marked âgender neutralâ. In my day they were just marked âbathroomâ and we assumed everyone used it.
I was in a coed dorm for 3 years, but engaged to a guy in another state the entire time. Some years when my door closed I had down time, some years my roommateâs boyfriend seemed to be there 24/7.
@mom23g8kids I donât think thereâs any fuss. Just explanations of pros and cons.
Dâs friendship group in high school were largely estrogen-dominated, and she actually wanted an environment where males were part of the casual camaraderie found in the hall lounge and the give-and-take that is part-and-parcel of living next door to each other. She found that in the coed dorm in a way that she wouldnât had she lived in all-girl environment. As a result, some of her best friends freshman year were guys. Gay as well as straight guys, for that matter. And that was a good experience for her, IMO.
I donât think itâs a necessary part of college by any means, though. In fact, this year sheâs living on all-girl floor. 
" Since the beginning of colleges they were not coed, why must they be now? "
Certainly, itâs become normalized. Regardless of anyoneâs feelings about it, itâs water under the bridge.
May I suggest if your DD wants some âaway timeâ from the guys, she could commute and remain at home, try to get into single gender housing, she close her door or find a place away from the dorm. If affordable and allowed, move off campus.
Yep, that has been brought to my attention. Thank you. It was an attempt at humor and I will be more careful next time.
If she canât get into a female only dorm, I would recommend a suite style dorm where all the members are female. This would be no different that life in the real world of apartment living where your neighbors are of either sex. But again, I would caution that she must have like minded suitemates. My D spent her last summer doing research. She was assigned housing with two girls (she had no choice and even if she had, it was at a school where she didnât know anyone so it wouldnât have mattered). They each had their own bedroom and a common living area. Turned out one of them had a boyfriend who pretty much moved in for the summer. Talk about no privacy!
Yes, that is the most helpful take away from this post for me. It sounds like a single sex dorm really is not the answer and I understand why. I was not aware of the option of suites and that is really much more of what I think would work for her. Thanks to all those who brought this to my attention!
I am guessing that colleges started going coed for all the reasons others have listed. And as more colleges did so, more colleges realized there was no issue. It works. A college is a town. Towns are not single sex. It works because 99.9% of all people are just normal people who want to get on with their lives. If by an awful chance the .1% person wants to do bad stuff, a single sex dorm will not matter.
I really think you are concerned about the wrong things. Focus on retention and graduation rates. Focus on majors, academics, professors, what kind of students are at the college, campus safety, crime reports, etc⊠Focus on the big stuff.
Yes, that was my experience too. I would close my dorm room and then it would be knocked on constantly and often there were boys coming in and out even when I was trying to study. It really sounds like the suites are a great solution.
Now you have a couple more issues to think about:
- At some colleges, incoming students do not get to choose whether to live in a suite-style or corridor-style dorm. You and your student will have to consider whether this is a dealbreaker.
- Many students who live in corridor-style dorms their freshman year love it because of the opportunity to meet lots and lots of people. Some feel that suites are better reserved for upperclassmen, who already have friends and aren't desperately looking for more. It's an issue worth discussing with your student.
Another word of cautionâŠsome schools simply assign the freshman to whatever dorm, so you may not have a choice. If this is really important to you, you need to ask about it. Neither of my kids had any choice what dorm they would be in (or who their roommates were) as frosh. Other schools you do pay by what type of dorm you select so youâll have more say over the matterâŠbut again that would be based on availability.
At the beginning of colleges, they only taught Greek and Latin. Studying that material â like living in an all-male dorm â is still an option at some places, but not a popular one.
Freshman year I lived in a dorm (standard double occupancy rooms sprinkled with 4 singles for the RAs). Our unit was 36 freshman and we were coed by room. There were two bathrooms, the big kind with 5 sinks, 5 stalls, 4 showers with curtains (though these were large and each had two shower heads, so technically 8 people could shower at a time).
The way our unit was set up, there were 12 of us on one hall, then a big open foyer with people going in and out of the building, then the other 24 students on the other hallway. One bathroom was with the 12, the other with the 24, and at the far end of their hall at that.
We had a vote day one and some were very insistent about having single sex bathrooms. The distance and the open foyer were discussed but still it was decided to go for single sex, and we would switch the location 2nd semester so no one was inconvenienced all year.
This arrangement lasted about a week, as people decided they preferred the convenience of using the bathroom closest to them and not having to parade in robe and towel past the building entrance (or run to the opposite end of the hall in an emergency when there was a bathroom right next door). I also think as people got to know each other, there was less embarrassment or concern.
I still remember though, my first time in a coed bathroom. I had arrived early for an extra orientation and pretty much had the place to myself. I went into the bathroom nearest my room, which said âWomenââtook a shower and was in my robe brushing my teeth at the sink when a guy walked in! I turned beet red and said, âIâm sorry, am I in the wrong bathroom?â He immediately introduced himself as one of my RAs, apologized for startling me, and explained that the bathrooms were coed unless we decided differently. It was a bit of a shock but after that, not a big deal to me personally.
A third possibility is that a student may select a specific special interest program and the dorm goes with it. For example, students in an honors program may be assigned to the honors dorm. Since special programs often have only one dorm or portion of a dorm assigned to them, you donât get a choice of where to live.
Honors dorms or living learning communities are often in special dorms so that you can make it a point to choose the llc in order to be in the ârightâ hall for you.
Sonoma State and Loyola Maryland have beautiful suite style dorms. As do UAlabama and UScranton, already listed above.
And those special programs are often well worth a little dorm inconvenience, whether the co-ed issue or something else. One if my kids chose to live in a specific learning community at her college freshman year, and post-college she now credits it to helping her get off to a start in school with dorm friends who were serious about academics. She said that group was proportionally over represented in the Phi Beta Kappa graduates in her class.