<p>The vast majority of freshmen at Brown live in doubles with the bathroom down the hall. Most dorms at Brown are pretty utilitarian; there are suites for upper classes though.</p>
<p>I understand that more kids today are only children or from small families than when I went to school, so the double with shared bathroom must seem like a punishment to them. To me, it was one of the best parts of freshmen year.</p>
<p>I'd be more concerned about colleges that have forced triples.</p>
<p>UF honors dorm has a shared bath between two rooms, and a vanity/sink in each room as well as walk in closets. They clean the baths and vanities for you weekly as well as vacuum your room (carpeted), that is, if there's any floor to vacuum (they won't pick up)!</p>
<p>In my day at Yale, there were three or four (well-known) suites in the entire college system with bathrooms inside the suite. Everyone else shared. Maybe that's changed (or changing) with the renovations -- I haven't seen the inside of my college since the renovations ended there -- but I don't believe non-shared bathrooms are anything like the norm there.</p>
<p>When I toured NYU a few years ago, the sample dorm room they showed us on the tour didn't have a private bathroom, either. The quintuple suite in a relatively new freshman dorm at Harvard where I spent a few hours last spring shared a bathroom, too. I know at Chicago it's about 60-40 private-shared, depending on the dorm.</p>
<p>What's the big deal with sharing bathrooms? People have done it for generations. I don't remember anything awful associated with it.</p>
<p>I think virtually all dorm bathrooms are shared, but some are hall baths and some are suite-style baths with two singles or two doubles sharing the bath. I think it isn't a privacy thing as much as it is a convenience thing. My d leaves all her toiletries and makeup in her suite bathroom which is much easier than having to truck the stuff down the hall everyday.</p>
<p>By "shared" I meant hall (or landing) bathrooms. My "private" included bathrooms incorporated into a single suite behind the locked front door and shared only by that suite's residents.</p>
<p>My d leaves all her toiletries and makeup in her suite bathroom which is much easier than having to truck the stuff down the hall everyday.</p>
<p>:) I don't think my D wore make up at school
They did have shelves in the bathroom however, and most of the kids I think had the baskets with their shampoo etc- that they just took into the shower with them and put it back on the shelf when they were done.</p>
<p>I don't think it was a big deal- after all she grew up in a house with 4 people/one bathroom. At least at school there was more than one toilet/sink/shower that could be used at a time!</p>
<p>Which is grosser though? A suite bathroom, shared by only a few kids, that is never cleaned (which is usually, but not always the case). Or a hall bathroom shared by lots of kids that is cleaned daily? Hmmm.</p>
<p>weenie, my thoughts exactly.</p>
<p>I heard that a summer program I was considering for my daughter did not clean the communal bathrooms for the duration (5-weeks), leaving this chore up to those in attendance.</p>
<p>I crossed that program right off our list.</p>
<p>My freshman year in college I lived in a dorm with singles and double on a hall and a bathroom down the hall. The next three years I lived in a suite with its own bathroom. I vastly preferred the former arrangement despite liking having a bathroom within the suite. It leads to a very different culture. In hallway dorms people are much more likely to leave doors open and casual socializing happens, as in someone walking down the hall yelling, "we're all going for pizza who wants to come?" Part of the problem is that at Harvard, at least, suites tend to be organized around entryways with only two suites leading off each floor. I don't believe there are any non-suite dorms left at Harvard, though some (not all) of the freshman dorms still have shared bathrooms on a hall.</p>
<p>agree with weenie. Even an obsessively cleanliness oriented student, or students, will usually not have the time to keep up a suite bathroom if responsible to do so. Busy student life not compatible with daily scrupulous housekeeping.</p>
<p>A friend's daughter at Bryn Mawr had a fireplace in her dorm. The dorms for upperclassmen at Northeastern are luxury-apartment style suites with magnificent views of downtown Boston.</p>
<p>Most of the dorm rooms at the University of Colorado-Boulder have bathrooms down the hall. The Main Campus dorms are beautiful on the outside, but a little worn on the inside. My D is at Williams Village, which is newer. Her dorm has sinks in the room, but you have to go down the hall for the toilets and showers.</p>
<p>The last chore I would want as a college student would be to clean my own bathroom. But your mileage may vary.</p>
<p>Bryn Mawr does have the most magnificent dorms! ldgirl rec'd quite a bit of literature from them and we were very impressed with the photos of the dorms.</p>
<p>My d's dorm is coed with rooms alternating between a suite with four girls and a private bath, then a suite with four boys and a private bath on a long hallway. They all keep their hall doors and bathroom doors open and everyone wanders in and out of each other's rooms. ldgirl says if you want to study or sleep in your room, you have to close the door and pretend not to be home because it's Grand Central Station otherwise (she loves all the commotion btw).</p>
<p>Disgusting as it may sound, a large corridor dorm with a large shared bathroom down the hall is an excellent arrangement for freshmen because it almost ensures that you will meet a lot of people -- a high priority for first-year students. </p>
<p>Suites sound more civilized and indeed they may be, but it's hard to meet anyone except for the small number (usually 4 to 8) of people who live in your suite. They are an excellent arrangement for upperclassmen who already have friends but are not so good for freshmen.</p>
<p>When I was a student at Cornell in the early 1970s, I spent my freshman year in a hideous concrete-block corridor dorm that had been built as temporary housing right after World War II (maybe I should put "temporary" in quotes; that set of dorms is only now being demolished and replaced by attractive modern buildings). The fifty-five girls on our floor shared one massive community bathroom (4 toilets, 6 showers, 8 sinks, and 4 boarded-up urinals left over from when it had been a men's floor). The place was a dump, but the opportunities to meet people (including the guys who lived on the floors above and below us) were wonderful. I'm glad I was assigned to this place, even though it was widely regarded as the worst hellhole on campus.</p>
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I'd be more concerned about colleges that have forced triples.
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<p>Very good point--I remember at my college, they had freshmen in forced triples, due to lack of space. All too often, two of the three roomates would bond together, and the third roomate would end up being ostracized.</p>
<p>When you go on tours they always show you the NICEST dorms they have...it could be the only building that looks like that, and therefore reserved for upperclassmen, or athletes/honors, etc. It doesn't necessarily mean you'll ever get a dorm like that there. For example, GWU used to lease some hotel which obviously had nice dorms (they've ended this deal) and those were the dorms they used to show on thier tours. However freshmen don't even live on the main campus of GWU now due to space so they really aren't getting those dorms.</p>
<p>^Well in the case of Baylor, this is just downright scary. The dorm we saw was wretched.</p>
<p>Good point about the forced triples. I have two siblings..three is never a good number and particularly not in a tiny room originally meant for two.</p>
<p>most dorms at my school (WM) have the hall bathrooms. There are some that have a bathroom for 2 rooms, but I personally would rather not have those. Hall bathrooms are cleaned by the school, and you can leave things there, you don't to take them back and forth all the time. Be honest, you will not clean your bathroom very often.</p>
<p>If I had to guess, I would say the Ivies and such have dorms that aren't as nice as a whole because they don't depend on their dorms to sell the school to prospective students. I did a summer program at Princeton, and the dorm we were in didn't even have a bathroom on the same level. I thought that was pretty poor. I really liked the rooms though (although no AC, not nice in the summer).</p>
<p>However, I also wouldn't classify "nice dorms" as "dorms that don't have hall bathrooms."</p>
<p>On the whole, bathroom quality and architecture are so far down on the ranked list of what's important about a college that they ought to be irrelevant to any decision among two or three specific schools.</p>