You may wonder why we brought you together ...

Taking a sharply different approach is Davidson College in Davidson, N.C., where freshmen roommates are matched painstakingly by hand with attention to so many details that one official describes it as a complex "Rube Goldberg" system.

Davidson officials spend several weeks each June matching just 475 freshmen. First, they take results of a Myers-Briggs personality type test (extrovert, introvert, etc.) and put complementary types together. Then habits and preferences of entering freshmen filled out on cards are weighed. (Early birds and night owls are grouped, for instance.) Finally, admissions files are reviewed to match economic, academic, and family backgrounds.

"It's both science and art," says Leslie Marsicano, Davidson's director of residence life. "Some institutions have tried to rely only on the science side. They send you a form, you fill it out, they scan it. If you match 6 of 10 variables, you're roommates. We deal with the art side, too."

The "art" of Davidson's system means a freshman who is an only child with a single parent would probably not be matched with the youngest of 10 children living at home with two parents. Likewise, a vegan would not be paired with the son of a cattle rancher, Marsicano says.

But critics say pairing roommates who are alike misses the point - that college is all about having a roommate different from you so you can learn more from each other. Marsicano agrees - up to a point.

"We would put them on the same hall," she says. "We want ... a diverse neighborhood. But in the room, we're looking for compatibility. We think it's a lot to ask of the vegan and the cattle rancher to live together in the same small room."

Davidson's results speak for themselves, she says: a retention rate from freshman to sophomore year of 97 percent; a 90 percent graduation rate; and about 40 percent of sophomores rooming again with freshman-year roommates.

"We've been pretty compatible, living together for three years now," says Shanna Cockman, a Davidson junior majoring in psychology.

Roberta, her volleyball-playing roommate, is "kind of the shyer of the two of us," Ms. Cockman says. "I'm kind of the other way. She's really like a sister to me now more than a roommate."

Davidson's system might seem unwieldy at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Of 15,500 undergraduates living on campus, nearly 7,000 are freshmen.

Michigan screens academic and living-space priorities, then smoking and a few other categories. Names then go into a lottery system. But some parents insist their child be allowed to room with old friends.

"What we do find is that those are usually the relationships that break up first," says Angela Brown, director of university housing. "It's almost as if they are too familiar with each other. Students tend to be more tolerant of someone they don't know than someone they do."

Arash Mahajerin, a junior at Michigan, may be an exception. He had known his first roommate since third grade. It was a good year. "I figured things would be fine as long as we were both honest and up front with each other," he says.

His tips: "Be neat. Don't leave clothes lying around, CDs, books - and really respect when it's time for the other person to study," he says. "We're here for an education, after all."

Page: 1 | 2