Coed dorms but not coed potties. That is a platform I can support
Women and urinals just don’t go together
Making more stuff up I see. Who here is suggesting anything approaching that?
You won’t even know it is happening until it is too late (or ever… I just found out 7 years later about D1’s co-ed bathroom in her soph year). And regarding dating others in the dorm, that is awkward after breakup regardless of restroom arrangements – D2 is struggling with the issue of 2 exes in her dorm right now, forget the bathrooms.
Anyone here have urinals in their co-ed bathrooms? Chirp, chirp…
ETA: Why don’t we have urinals in houses, actually?
Guys like to use urinals. No urinals in the dorms for men? I recall there were 30 years ago
http://www.marketplace.org/2014/12/22/business/ive-always-wondered/why-arent-more-urinals-installed-homes
http://www.houzz.com/ideabooks/16700646/list/should-you-install-a-urinal-at-home
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/2010/mar/29/ask-leo-urinals
http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/for-the-guys-a-urinal-at-home-132305
I know a family with 4 boys and when they built a new house they put in urinals.
Smart move. A water saver for sure
For all those saying they don’t want their S or D going to a school with <pick-your-favorite-reason>, how does it help them by trying to continue sheltering them from life?
@AroundHere , maybe someone addressed your question, but I googled Crime stats and Clery report for every college my D applied to. If you google Clery report, it usually gets you right to the report. Sometimes colleges bury the report. You have to look carefully, because there are new categories of offenses, such as stalking and date crimes, if I recall.
This is a great video on stopping hazing on college campuses:
https://bea2015.secure-platform.com/a/gallery/rounds/124/details/19912
Just been glancing through the last four pages of comments. Honestly, bathrooms? I can’t believe anyone cares. We ended up doing about 10 campus tours and I can’t recall a single person ever asking about bathrooms.
@jpm50 I don’t think kids suddenly become full blown adults the minute they graduate high school and I think it’s part of being a parent that we help them with important decisions. It’s a gradual process of backing off. For me, it’s probably the last big decision I’ll be actively involved in and it will hopefully set my child up for a successful 4 years at college and the beginning of their adult life.
I’m not sure I would have actually vetoed a school if my child was set on it. If her career goal is to become the first female priest and she wants to attend a Catholic college…
@lindagraf Obviously lots of people do care about bathrooms. It was not a dealbreaker for me, rather a surprise. There was one college we considered that has all coed bathrooms and I wanted my D to know that. Even though she goes to a very liberal boarding school and has lots of friends and acquaintances of all genders and sexual persuasions, including at least one friend who is transgender, she did not like the idea of all coed bathrooms. However, since that college looked like a good fit otherwise, she said she “would deal” with it and I’m sure she would have done fine. The college ended up off the list for other reasons.
People don’t ask about bathrooms on tours because they have no idea that coed bathrooms even exist.
On the Vassar tour, the guide made a point of discussing the gender neutral bathrooms when we got to the dorms. Not co-ed, gender neutral, so as to include trans and other categories. A mom and daughter got into a heated debate about this in audible whispers for most of the rest of the tour.
At Oberlin, the students get to vote on it for their respective dorm floors. There are a variety of options, including making the bathroom single-sex temporarily when you are in it. It involves manipulating a sign outside the bathroom.
It goes to show that on college campus tours you want to have eyes wide open on exactly the living conditions your son and daughter will be living in so there are no surprises.
I agree that there is a difference between a co-ed bathroom that is single-gender at any one moment and one where guys and girls and transgender people could theoretically all be using the same general space at the same time. S’s freshman dorm was co-ed, alternating male and female by room. It had one communal bathroom for 3 rooms, or 6 people. But it was single use; one person went in and closed the door. So a boy would never be in it at the same time as a girl. I was fine with that. I would probably be OK with a bathroom with multiple toilet stalls that was co-ed. Co-ed showers, where a male and female could be showering in adjacent stalls, I would not like.
Oberlin seems way to the left and then some.
Their co op living arrangements are a deal breaker for us
Too many potentially embarrassing situations can arise. College is stressful enough without all this extra drama. If somebody walks in on somebody else by mistake it may be misconstrued and a bigger issue is having to be dealt with.
After visiting probably 20 LACs with our kid, pretty much every campus we were on had gender neutral or co-ed bathrooms. At some schools, the norm was that the floor would vote how to handle it, some halls had two bathrooms, and students would collectively decide whether to have two co-ed or single sex etc. I can only recall a very few (Dickinson) where sections of the freshman dorm were single sex by hall or floor with single sex bathrooms, and after freshman year, all dorms were fully coed with students deciding how to handle bathrooms. Oberlin is not much an outlier on this. Kenyon, Bates, Connecticut, they pretty much all had co-ed bathrooms as best as I recall.
At the big public flagships, there were simply male and female bathrooms, no voting. But that was for the big high rise dorms.