What do you think about "coed" bathrooms in college dorms

<p>Haven’t been to Paris lately. . .do they have showers? (or toilet paper?)</p>

<p>We had this at Yale 30 years ago as well. You get used to it.</p>

<p>Do you get dressed in the stall?</p>

<p>My recollection from 30 years ago is that people wore bathrobes or big towels. There was really no space in the bathroom to really get dressed anyway. It was two showers, two toilets, and two sinks for (I think) 12 people.</p>

<p>poetgrl, there’s a small changing room for a single occupant between the shower and the main bathroom. You get dressed/undressed in that small room, which is roughly the size of the shower stall. I’ve certainly used facilities like this in non-campus single-sex bathrooms, primarily in gym bathrooms with updated facilities. </p>

<p>atomom, these were just toilet facilities, not full bathrooms. Though it was wicked hot, and a shower would’ve been just the ticket. :)</p>

<p>I’ve observed that the school with community bathroom had students which were more modest than the dorm with single sex bathrooms where it was more a case of anything goes.
The stalls do come all the way down to the floor & the shower stall was almost as big as my bathroom at home, so plenty of room to get dressed.</p>

<p>What year is this? Wow, we had coed bathrooms in the 70’s. It’s fine.</p>

<p>I went to college in 1975 with co-ed hall bathrooms. No big deal. Suite bathrooms if coed suites had been allowed at the time) would have been even less of a problem since at this particular college they were all single fixture and you could lock the door on them. There are stalls for the toilets and changing areas for the showers. You may see your neighbors brushing their teeth in PJs, but they are already walking around the halls that way anyway.</p>

<p>I just designed a gym where at the client’s request there are male and female locker rooms, but the shower area is co-ed - basically it’s a corridor between the two with separate shower rooms each with it’s own changing area. I was asked to do it this way because at times this particular gym is very female heavy and at other times of day it is mostly males.</p>

<p>Wow, I didn’t expect to see so many comments! BTW, of the two colleges we saw, they did not show us bathrooms on the tour on one of them (just told us they were coed) and my son crossed that one off the list for various other reasons. The other one we did see. It had about 6 stalls, but the walls did not go to the floor, i.e., you could see your neighbor’s feet next door. The shower stalls had full length shower curtains. Personally, for me, it would be less of an issue if the walls in the stalls went down to the floor! Haha.</p>

<p>No coed bathrooms at my college 30 years ago. Even the coed dorm had single sex floors.</p>

<p>Neither of my Ds would be okay with this. D1 lived in a single sex suite set up both years in the dorms, then apartments with other girls.</p>

<p>D2 lived in an all girls dorm, now in an apartment with other girls.</p>

<p>This is hard for me to decide since I’m not clear on what is a coed college bathroom. Are there multiple stalls with doors, sinks and mirrors, and that’s it? Or is a shower included? How is it walled off? Are there urinals? Is it intended for one person at a time?
Some have joked about coed baths at home but does that mean multiple people of both genders are using all the facilities at the same time- or is it open to both genders, but one at a time with door locked?</p>

<p>younghoss, there are plenty of descriptions of co-ed bathrooms in the thread already. </p>

<p>No urinals. At least, not out in the open.</p>

<p>If it is really that much of a concern for your student, he may want to ask if single-gender floors are available. At Berkeley decades ago, the coed floors had coed bathrooms, but students could request a single-gender floor (there were typically one male and one female floor in each coed dorm). There was (and still is) one all-male and one all-female dorm.</p>

<p>I had the opposite experience from atomom’s son as far as cleanliness of females vs. males. I worked on campus as a custodian during my college days and we flipped coins to see who cleaned which bathrooms. The loser always got stuck with the women’s bathrooms. They were always much dirtier and took longer to clean than the men’s bathrooms.</p>

<p>My wife and I went to my college reunion weekend this past spring. We stayed in a dorm. We had a co-ed bathroom – two shower stalls, two sinks, and one toilet for what seemed like 4-5 men and 2 women in four rooms. People got dressed in their rooms. We didn’t run into each other much. It was not a big deal.</p>

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<p>Officially, maybe, but guests have to use a bathroom somewhere, and even if there’s one reserved for opposite-sex guests in some obscure corner of the building, they’re likely to use the one nearest the room of the person they’re visiting.</p>

<p>I did this myself when visiting my son’s all-male dorm floor when he was a freshman. Hey, when you have to go, you have to go.</p>

<p>Back in the early 80s, my private girls dorm didn’t allow men on the floors AT ALL except once or twice a year, for open houses. Then I went to visit my boyfriend at MIT. He lived on a mixed floor with a single bathroom for both sexes. I stayed with one of the girls. The arrangement kind of freaked me out at first, but I got used to it quickly.</p>

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<p>I’ve seen lots of mixed group bathrooms, especially at places where the women decide that the wait at the women’s bathroom is too long (or inconvenient). I had a woman decide to use the men’s bathroom at law school, presumably because it was the only one on that floor. I attended a boat race (regatta) where beer was being consumed in quantity and the women just lined up at the men’s bathroom door with the men and the men used the urinals while the women were waiting in line. I was at a county fair last summer and down at the shore also where women used the men’s bathroom because the women’s line was long. The women, of course, have no problem with it because they are using the closed stalls.</p>

<p>At my son’s former college, the bathrooms were single sex by floor, i.e. the men could use the first or fifth floor bathrooms and the women could use the second, third and fourth floor bathrooms. It would have been difficult to make the bathrooms in this mid-19th century dorm co-ed because there was no space for separate changing rooms and only a shower curtain separating the shower from the main bathroom.</p>

<p>Wow…MLH, the early 80s? When I went to college from 1969-1973, things really changed. My freshman year, opposite sex folks had to be escorted and only during certain hours. By my sophomore year, dorms were much more open to the opposite sex.</p>

<p>And that was pretty much when coed dorms came into play also.</p>

<p>You know…kids adapt.</p>

<p>Now people are talking about ocassional or emergency usage.
That is fine but why would you want to over-pay for dorm rooms and have to put up with those conditions for years ?</p>