<p>I think the reason you are getting pushback, from me and from others, is that it takes a very narrow perspective to call dorms “unnatural circumstances”. As many of us have said, similar living arrangements are and always have been common for a huge percentage of young people from an early age to whenever they start families. It’s not even a question of wealth – the children of the wealthy used to live in barracks at their summer camps, and again in boarding schools (or in smaller rooms like college dorms). It’s the one-bedroom-one-bathroom-per-kid suburban standard that seems unnatural to me, at least.</p>
<p>As for your story – boy, does that ever sound like an urban legend. I don’t think it would be possible anymore, at least not since the case at Yale where someone in his early 30s did that. In any event, my daughter had a man in his late 30s as a classmate in college, living in the same dorm as she their first year. He was assigned a single.</p>
<p>I know, JHS, it does sound like an urban legend. Truly, when he started telling me this, saying he was “trying to sort it out”, I became more and more horrified. But think about it – what are the criteria for college entrance? “Reasons you were fired from a job” don’t appear on applications, at least not to my knowledge. I don’t have a problem with people older than 18-25 living in dorms, but I’d wonder what their story is. </p>
<p>I’m not sure if it’s common, JHS. I only know that I have never been in a situation like that – in my experiences with roommates, I chose to share apartments or houses with specific people and never people selected at random for me. Sure, it’s a narrow perspective, but it’s the only one I have! lol</p>
<p>I think that Rivers Cuomo lived in a dorm when he returned to Harvard in his 30s in order to finish his studies. But he was assigned a single.</p>
<p>JHS is right that children of the wealthy are used to going to boarding school and summer camp. In fact, we paid through the nose so that our son could attend the camp where he had to share his room (not much larger than his room at home) with 15 other kids, two per bunk beds with sagging mattresses and broken springs, too-small chests of drawers with missing knobs and ice cold showers. But he absolutely loved it.</p>
<p>I also remember touring Eton and overhearing some foreign tourists exclaiming that it looked more like a prison than the school for the children of the English aristocracy.</p>
<p>And from the other side of the wealth spectrum, my Irish female ancestors “dormed” with as many teenage girls as could fit into an apartment so they could all go off during the day and work as laundresses or maids for the middle class. They not only shared rooms, they shared beds. </p>
<p>And seriously, lots of people in urban areas took in boarders, who shared the bathrooms and common living areas.</p>