<p>I’ll describe the coed bathrooms from my freshman year (20+ years ago). Large room with maybe 4-5 stalls. No urinals. 4-5 sinks with mirrors. Around the corner from the sinks, 4 shower stalls with curtains. All with hooks outside on the walls. Each shower stall had a triangular prominence and the shower heads came off the sides of the triangle. Therefore each shower stall could fit 2 students. Most of the time, you got a shower stall to yourself, but if you were in a rush and ran into, say, your roommate in the shower you could hop in with her. Of course, you also sometimes got boy/girl combos in there too (platonic and otherwise).</p>
<p>As I previously mentioned—our freshman unit was essentially divided into 2 sections by a large public entryway with staircase, a lot of traffic. There were about 40 students in the unit—maybe 14 on one side with a bathroom somewhat close to the entryway, and 26 on the other with their bathroom being as far away from the entryway as you could get. So if the bathrooms were single sex, there were about 8 women who would have to not only walk by a perfectly good bathroom, but cross this entryway and then walk down the whole rest of the hallway in robe/towel/whatever to get to the women’s room (and therefore about 16 men who would have to do the same).</p>
<p>This was so quickly proven not to be convenient that even the mostly diehard proponents of single sex bathrooms quickly changed their minds. The women said sharing with the guys was better than being on parade up and down the hallway and through the common entryway, and it also proved more prudent when, for example, one’s period arrived suddenly or one had the stomach flu (can’t imagine having to run past a usable bathroom and 18 rooms with such an emergency). </p>
<p>As far as cleanliness, men and women can both be neatniks, and can definitely both be slobs. Both groups had their issues!</p>
<p>Back in the day, for most of my college career I lived in dorms that had co-ed bathrooms but for a block of time in the morning (7-10 or something) they were single gender. The rest of the time they were “knock and enter” meaning you would tap on the door before entering and the person in there would reply by saying either their gender or “come in” therefore it could stay single gender or not.</p>
<p>My senior year I lived in small dorm with only 8 (4 males, 4 females) of us on the floor, and our bathroom was co-ed.</p>
<p>Not at all. I was contending that most students do not object to coed bathrooms, at least not enough to consider it a reason to select a single-gender floor when they are in a traditional rooms-off-a-hall-with-gang-bathroom dorm. Remember that in the situation that I described, no one was assigned a coed floor with a coed bathroom if they did not want that, so it was purely student’s choice with full disclosure before the student turned in the preference card.</p>
<p>Of course, it would not be surprising if students generally preferred completely private bathrooms, or at least shared-in-a-suite bathrooms, over gang bathrooms. But that is not the subject of this thread, although it does appear that suite type of dorms are getting to be more common than traditional rooms-off-a-hall-with-gang-bathroom dorms.</p>
<p>Where is your data that suggests that coed bathrooms are so objectionable to most students that there should not even be the option of a coed floor, if the building is such that such a floor would have a coed bathroom?</p>
<p>My d lives in a coed suite with a coed bathroom. There is an opposite sex couple who have single rooms in the suite, d and her female roommate, and a gay guy and gender neutral person (biological female) who share the other room. They all share the suite bathroom which has two toilet stalls and two shower stalls with real doors. I just asked her how she felt about it. One of the guys doesn’t think he should have to put the toilet seat down, but other than that, she just shrugged.</p>
<p>And, again, the number of people sharing the bathroom also has a lot to do with it. A suite with a bathroom with 1-2 toilets, 1-2 showers, 1-2 sinks – serving maybe 8-10 people, meaning that it’s relatively rare for multiple people to need it at the same time – resembles the set-up in a private home a heck of a lot more than it resembles the “rows and rows of facilities to serve the entire hall” set-up in which it’s quite possible that many people will be using the facilities at the same time.</p>
<p>Ucbalmunus, you are the one making the claims, not me. I’m just asking you to support them. You are the one that has the obigation to provide facts and data, and you haven’t done it. </p>
<p>My daughter wouldn’t be interested in a coed floor, much less a coed bathroom. Maybe she’s the exception.</p>
<p>Apparently, going by the supply meeting the demand.
People are lazy.
Walk a couple yards to a unisex toilet or the end of the hall for single sex.
Hope those who object dont live in california.
[Governor</a> Brown signs co-ed bathroom bill for schools, school districts state no changes to be made as of yet :: The Fallbrook Village News](<a href=“http://www.thevillagenews.com/story/72693/]Governor”>http://www.thevillagenews.com/story/72693/)</p>
<p>( when there is demand, schools do offer a single sex floor or even dorm- or in the case of a womens college- a whole school! ;)- they often have great merit aid too!)</p>
<p>I have supported my claim. I have not supported the claim that you are arguing against, because I did not make that claim.</p>
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<p>When I went to college, where the traditional dorms had coed floors with coed bathrooms, she would not be required to live in such, since she could have requested a single gender floor and be put in one if she were assigned such a dorm (as opposed to the one all-female dorm, or a suite dorm). I.e. they accommodated almost everyone’s choice in this respect (the only ones not accommodated would be the ones who preferred coed floors but were “drafted” into the single gender floors to fill them up if there were not enough “don’t cares”).</p>
<p>So why is it such a big deal for you if no one is forced to have a coed bathroom, even though most students didn’t find it objectionable?</p>
<p>My experience in college, and what I observe with my children and their friends, is that no one says “I affirmatively want co-ed bathrooms! Every bathroom I use should be co-ed.” If everyone got to choose and resources were unlimited, every bathroom would be not only single-sex, but actually single-individual (although cleaned by someone else, of course).</p>
<p>Co-ed bathrooms happen because people’s objections to sharing bathrooms with near-neighbors of another sex turn out to be less than their objections to whatever inconvenience they or others would have to go through to use a single-sex bathroom. In practice, it’s easier to share a bathroom with men or women you know than to walk a long distance to another bathroom. And while it is always possible that someone could make someone else feel uncomfortable, 99.99% of the students in this situation bend over backward to be respectful of others’ privacy and to make the best, not the worst, of a situation that was no one’s first choice. And that turns out to be pretty easy, and fairly satisfactory to everyone, so it’s no big deal.</p>
<p>And, you know what? I would bet dollars to donuts that riprorin’s daughter, faced with that situation, would make the same choices and act the same way most other people do. Human beings, especially young ones are really good at adapting to new circumstances. It’s one of our better qualities.</p>
<p>Thank you. This is precisely what I suspected – that no one affirmatively wanted them, but that people made the best of what they had, because it was preferable to walking a long distance. </p>
<p>Which still gets to – so how are newer dorms being designed?<br>
With “deliberately co-ed” bathrooms?
Or with male and female bathrooms spaced in such a way that no one of either gender needs to walk a long distance to get to a bathroom?<br>
Or is it all moot because suite-style bathrooms are shared by fewer and thus don’t cause as much discomfort because it’s rare for more than one person to occupy them at any given time?</p>
<p>I honestly don’t know, given that S’s school has (IMO) mostly crappy, outdated dorms and it’s moot for D’s school (though they do designate some of the bathrooms as coed for the purpose of overnight guests).</p>
<p>I can’t speak for all schools, d lived for two years in a dorm that was finished in 1997.( she started school in 2001)
( lac)
This was the school with the enclosed toilets & showers with doors. Senior yr she lived in a school owned 2 bedroom townhouse just across the street with a male roommate & they each had their own bathroom.</p>
<p>It does seem like suite-style dorms are becoming much more common which makes the whole bathroom thing less of an issue.</p>
<p>I also suspect that there are a fair number of schools where newer, more modern dorms have other drawbacks. For many students, a nice old building with character right in the middle of campus is preferable to a new dorm on the edge of campus–even if the bathrooms and other amenities are not as nice.</p>
<p>Neither kid attended a school with suite style dorms, we did look at one however.</p>
<p>My youngest who attends a medium university has lived off campus since sophomore year. Her housing is closer to the middle of the campus than her dorm was, although it was a very nice dorm ( albeit her room was on the 4th floor of a building with no elevators. But they had gorgeous windows & cathedral ceilings)</p>
Hmmm, isn’t this design/redesign flaw a warning beacon of the quality of the School of Architecture? If student is majoring in Architecture then put the school at the bottom of the list.</p>
<p>For new building maybe. My guess is a lot of this discussion is centering around older schools with older dorms that were built as single sex dorms and in many cases when the schools were single sex. When converting these dorms to coed dorms an issue never considered when the building was designed has popped up.</p>
<p>Funny, my daughters and I were all discussing this yesterday. Two of my three are done with undergrad, and my youngest was looking at schools this weekend…this was an issue back in the days of my 23 yr old was looking at schools. One of them had co ed bathrooms and it was a huge turnoff for her</p>
<p>Hat, I agree. I have seen state schools with two bedroom/two bathroom suites for just two students. Yes, if one can afford it, I can’t fault them, but do they each need their own bathroom?</p>