In my experience the point is moot since college students,by and by and regardless of designation, go to whichever bathroom is closest to where they are.
A dealbreaker for one of D16’s accepted LACs was the very strict co-ed visitation policy. Also she specifically asked if one of her public flagship schools had co-ed housing as in on the same floor/same room and was told it was being added this year.
Please… when will the CC community get over the blanket assumption that B/C students are unmotivated, underserving dredges of society that have poor judgement skills with little hope or ability to graduate in 4 years from the palaces of academia that should be reserved for only the special snowflake “A” students.
Maybe society is progressing to the place where your sexual plumbing has no bearing on your college experience in the dorms, on campus, or in the bathroom/shower. As long as there are hormones though I doubt it
You don’t know how understated that is. Really amazing. Though it is a highly ranked school.
@Baylorpoly, you are lucky if you see the inside of ONE dorm on a campus tour. Your tour guide won’t know the setup of every hall, dorm, special interest housing, co-op, etc. Keeping your eyes open won’t be much help. And all you will know frosh year is what you see at dropoff – you may not even see your kid’s room in future years, especially if they go to school a plane ride away. And the floor may vote on a different configuration later in frosh year. Or your kid may change dorms.
I’ve been on a LOT of tours and most of the time the guide would say “That’s the bathroom for this section of the dorm, but we can’t go in there, yada, yada.” I don’t recall anyone ever asking about the gender distributions.
There is a push/trend towards providing at least some gender-neutral bathrooms on campus - in classroom buildings as well as dorms - for the sake of the transgender students. The ones I have been in are single-person use and are also more accommodating to the handicapped than some of the standard facilities.
Bathrooms seem to have come up on a fair number of the tours we’ve been on. As a parent I’ve only toured schools in the South and there haven’t been any coed bathrooms. There have been worried parents asking about visitation policies and how/if the dorms were segregated by gender. And one where one mom asked a lot of questions about how many stalls there were and such. She seemed quite convinced that there were not enough and there would be long waits. Which I’ve never encountered in any dorm so that seemed odd to me.
I was a tour guide in college and the options for coed or single sex floors was a standard part of our script.
@labegg I graduated highschool with a 3.37, 3.5 freshman and sophomore grades. I had a handful of b’s c’s and some a’s
junior year(2.5 I failed some courses and retook them senior year. Senior year I held a 4.0
I am in the process of applying to med school with a current 3.6 gpa in Biochem and 29 first try mcat, I will take it one more time.
I agree that just because some students are b or c students that they shouldn’t be seen as the scum of the earth.
Truth is, I did not care about school until I was a senior. I aced my tests and never did homework. I am now in a good position and path. Some kids just mature later, I happened to be 18 when I finally started taking things seriously.
Reading “The Salesman” really helped me mature and realize I had to put in effort, as did failing classes. That was a wake up call.
Gosh, all this parental talk about bathrooms (and visitation policies!!!) seems so quaint. You had 18 years to instill your values (and fears and biases) on your kids. Now it’s time to step aside.
Full disclosure: if my kids wanted to attend a racist, homophobic, sexist institution, and by that I mean one that is clearly those things, not one which is accused of being that by social justice warriors, I would not have funded it. Thankfully, they did not test my resolve 
I have no doubt my child has been properly instilled with our values, and that other people’s children have been instilled with theirs. That’s exactly the reason for the concern.
You can’t know or correct for every possible difference in how your kid was brought up vs. what they’ll find in college. I’m not sure you can even minimize the challenges they’ll face, as they’ll just discover things you couldn’t possibly know about. No matter how conservative or liberal the college is, your kid will be on their own there all day every day for 9 months of the year. If a parent thinks that they can control how their student acts during that time, they’re sort of kidding themselves.
I say this as the parent of a kid who purposely picked a college with restricted visitations, dress code and a curfew. Co-ed bathrooms aren’t even a thought there. But it was HER choice to make, not mine, and I suspect that even there she will find temptations I haven’t even dreamed about. I will have to rely on her to make sensible decisions as I will not be in the next room.
To every parent here. Odds are your kid has smoked/will smoke pot. Odds are your kid will drink, as so many do.
Odds are they will probably have sex in college. ‘Gasp’ before they are married. Co-ed bathrooms won’t make it easier, or harder. It will probably happen.
My best advice is teach them to be safe and to not put themselves at risk. Teach them about how to drink responsibly, even underage. Teach them about never to post pictures on social media about anything they do. Teach them to make smart decisions, even when they do make the “bad” ones.
There is a lot of alcohol and drug use in college, it seems college campuses are simply stuck in a time warp and have taken on the soul of woodstock(since most of you parents know what I’m talking about;) )
Pick a school based on it’s academics and policies, not because of bathrooms and dorming. Drugs, sex, alcohol…That is what college is, just so happens to be that some students come out of it ready for med school and being engineers;)
But really, don’t let dorms be the deciding factor if everything else is perfect.
Bathrooms are an important considerations. Not having Kohler fixtures is a deal breaker for us.
This thread reminds me of people trying to write their will to maintain control from beyond the grave.
Toto toilets are an absolute must.
Toto toilets? Are those for colleges that allow pets?
@jym626, I looked at a house recently where the realtor raved about the “Japanese toilets” that the owner had installed. I did not take them for a spin; curiousity took a back seat (ha!) to propriety.
Odds are a lot of us did all those things too. I know I did. I think I did more questionable stuff in college than either of my kids.
@mathmom I bet, I know my mom was doing crazy things when she was a teen. Seems that a lot of parents are trying to go all anti whatever they did.
Dazed and confused sums up a lot of the late 90s and early 2000s parents, while our parents are about 10 years younger and products of the 80s.
I ‘stand’ corrected. Toto toilets will flush a dozen golf balls.