<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/williams-college/900458-coed-bathrooms.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/williams-college/900458-coed-bathrooms.html</a></p>
<p>^Williams College bathroom discussion.</p>
<p>I also note that neither the college my wife and I attended nor the college our children attended has had a single-sex dorm since before I went to college. My kids’ college has, I believe, two (small) dorms, each with one single-sex floor for women; maybe it can house 50 women on a single-sex floor. (One of them may have an all-male floor, too.) </p>
<p>My college did, and I think still does, house most freshmen in single-sex entryways, so the “shock” of co-ed bathrooms may not come until sophomore year. My kids each lived in a dorm for their first year of college only, and while they had co-ed floors they did not have co-ed bathrooms.</p>
<p>After college, I would not have an objection to my daughter having an unrelated, unromantically involved male apartment-mate. (In fact, that’s not a bad idea safety-wise to have a guy around.) Which would obviously mean that they’d have to share a bathroom, but presumably it would be of the “one-at-a-time” variety for any activity other than something at the sink. </p>
<p>My b/g twins share a bathroom at home; they have two sinks and of course they’ll brush teeth and do other sink ablutions side by side, but for bathing / shower and toilet activities, it’s one at a time.</p>
<p>I think if single sex housing were more popular with students we’d be seeing more of it.</p>
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<p>Mine did have one all-women dorm that I had the unlucky fortune of getting my sophomore year (bad lottery number), but it went co-ed shortly thereafter. There <em>might</em> be one small “women’s studies” all women’s dorm there, but everything else is coed to the best of my knowledge, with the exception of the Greek houses.</p>
<p>As time progresses, I think D would say she chose her single-sex college <em>despite</em> its single-sex nature.</p>
<p>There is a difference in “sharing” a single use facility vs. a room with multiple stalls right next to one another. At two different well known universities my kids never had to deal with the latter, so this is certainly not done everywhere. At one school, if even one person on the hall objected, the bathrooms on the hall remained single sex. At the other, there were in room bathrooms. I’d have hated sharing, personally. The showers wouldn’t have bothered me too much, but the stalls cross a line, IMO. </p>
<p>The real issue, I think, is money. It is too expensive to retrofit old buildings, constructed at a time when men and women lived on different halls and the LGBT issue was not recognized. </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/834024-bathroom-her-own-inside-higher-ed.html?highlight=coed+bathrooms[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/834024-bathroom-her-own-inside-higher-ed.html?highlight=coed+bathrooms</a></p>
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<p>Right, which is why those who experienced suites where a small bathroom was used by say 8 people aren’t really talking about the kind of thing we’re talking about.</p>
<p>My son informed me that I am wrong(!!! 
) and there are no all male or all female dorms, only all female/all male houses.</p>
<p>I was in an all male dorm with a community bathroom my first two years. Our floor would have a party once a semester in a neutral location with a floor from a girls dorm. That worked fine for me.</p>
<p>The only problem were the drunks who would pound on the doors at 3 am and break all the ceiling tiles in the hallway (which I got a $300 bill for even though I never broke one).</p>
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<p>That’s fine, and I think there are still a handful of colleges where your children could have that experience, too. But not so many. It’s pretty much a relic of the past, and I don’t see it coming back.</p>
<p>Does anyone here have a kid who found it difficult to get used to a mixed gender bathroom arrangement? If so, what did he or she do about it? Was he or she able to switch rooms or get the bathrooms changed?</p>
<p>I am surprised retrofitting is such an issue. My first dorm used to be all male several decades ago. The bathrooms back then had 3 or 4 stalls and a wall of urinals… and still do. They didn’t remodel them to make them ladies rooms. The urinals just aren’t used. I suppose if it’s such a small bathroom there are only 1-2 stalls for a hall full of girls that might be inconvenient but we had 20+ girls using our 4 stalls and I was almost never even in the bathroom at the same time as anyone else, so we had plenty of stalls.</p>
<p>I admit to having been in very few mens rooms, so perhaps more than 1-2 stalls is really unusual?</p>
<p>Most of my dorms had two stalls and two urinals for about 32 guys. 2 and 2 is pretty typical for public restrooms, as well. One stall will be handicap accessible.</p>
<p>The worst is when they decide to put the urinals in a corner, so you’re stuck standing there butt to butt with another dude.</p>
<p>Sue22, I would love to know the answer to that question, too. I suspect, after 250 posts and several days near the top of the page, the answer is no, no one has a story of a kid who found it difficult to get used to a mixed gender bathroom arrangement. I think we would have read about it by now. </p>
<p>It must have happened in the history of the world, but apparently not so often. One reason for that may well be that people with ultra strong feelings about it (like Orthodox Jews, or observant Muslims) choose colleges or living arrangements where the question will never arise, and other people with bathroom issued generally (of whom there are many) tend to avoid any kind of communal bathrooms, period, single sex or co-ed, and will actually make college decisions on that basis. So the people who find themselves using co-ed bathrooms are the people who are least likely to freak out about it.</p>
<p>Also, many colleges with coed bathrooms in coed floors do offer single-sex options that make it very unlikely that a student with a strong enough objection will involuntarily be put in a coed bathroom situation*. The growing tendency toward suite dorms may also reduce the number of students who could get a dorm with a potentially coed gang bathroom.</p>
<p>*However, some colleges do it wrong. There was a previous thread where a male student was uncomfortable with the situation; the college had the floor vote after move-in as to whether the three(!) bathrooms on the floor were single-sex or coed, so the female majority on that floor voted for one female bathroom and two coed bathrooms.</p>
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That is because my kid would not put herself into that uncomfortable, awkward situation. The same way I would not go to a nude beach or join a swingers’ club just because someone tells me, “Try it, you might like it/it’s no big deal."</p>
<p>If anything, this back and forth has illustrated that there are choices, and everyone seems to have either found something that works for them, or they were able to be flexible enough to adapt to what was offered.</p>
<p>I never heard of a person being forced to live with a coed bathroom. The floors decide on the very first day what to do. Some dorms, I remember, decided to make the first floor bathroom (door directly opposite the dorm entrance, and only men lived on the first floor) male only and the second floor a female only bathroom. This really meant any guys living on the second floor had to walk downstairs to use the bathroom. </p>
<p>In my dorm, that didn’t seem particularly friendly to the few rooms of guys on the second floor, so we went “coed”. It was really single sex in use (only one gender allowed at a time - if there was a girl in the bathroom, only girls could enter; likewise, if a boy was in the bathroom, only boys could enter).</p>
<p>There were so many different dorm options on campus that if the student wanted to avoid coed bathrooms, that was pretty easy to do.</p>
<p>Having a vote or other decision after move-in is an undesirable way of designating coed versus single-sex bathrooms. Better to ask on the preference questions and make floor and room assignments accordingly.</p>
<p>@ucbalumnus-
We voted after move-in but with the understanding that it had to be a unanimous vote, and if anyone was uncomfortable with the idea they could drop a note to the RA within a day and the bathrooms would remain single sex. People seemed to find proximity to the bathroom more valuable than not having to share.</p>