In the past 30 years, coed college dormitories have gone from rare to routine, with nearly all students who live on campus now sharing housing with members of the opposite sex.
But a study out today suggests that the shift may have had unintended results.
It finds that students in coed dorms are far more likely than those in single-sex dorms to drink alcohol regularly – and nearly 2½ times as likely to drink to excess on a weekly basis.
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More than 90% of college dorms today house both sexes, generally separated by floors or building wings, say the study's authors – yet very little research has accompanied the change.
The new findings, they say, suggest that colleges searching for ways to reduce binge drinking and other entrenched behaviors may consider whether the social pressures of coed housing are making matters worse.
Of course, the question needs to be asked: does the coed living situation fuel the behavior, or do students who would engage in the behavior anyways choose to live in a coed environment?
But the new findings on housing and heavy drinking "really caught us off-guard," says study co-author Brian Willoughby, who says the coed dorm students' responses represent "a difference that I think needs to be looked at in greater depth."
Willoughby, who conducted the research while at the University of Minnesota-St. Paul, now teaches at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, as does co-author Jason Carroll.
Some experts aren't impressed by the findings, though.
"Given the choice, only certain types of students would consider living in a coed residence hall, and the fact that they might be more 'libertine' than other students is hardly surprising," says William DeJong, a professor at Boston University School of Public Health.
"The authors want to suggest that (living in a coed dorm) leads to high-risk behavior, but that conclusion goes beyond their data, which only shows a correlation with choice of residence hall.
"What we can say is that college administrators and parents might want to pay extra attention to students who choose this living option, because they are in fact at higher risk than others."
But Willoughby says his analysis controlled for "potential selection effects" and found that virtually none of the students chose to live in a single-sex dorm; colleges simply placed them there.
All other things being equal, he says, "there was still something unique about living in a coed dorm that was associated with risk-taking."
It's true that the research presented in the article did not focus on the reasons students drank more and had sex at a higher rate; all that was really shown is that there is a correlation between these kinds of risky behavior and living in coed dorms. However, I don't think it's too far of a jump to say that when you place young adults in a mixed-gender living situation, a higher rate of sexual activity would not be surprising.
At the end of the day, it's a good idea to advise students going to college to really think about the environment they put themselves in.
