Reply #2: Side issue to this story- every dorm I've heard about bears a strong resemblance to

[hedgehog]

the island in Lord of the Flies. Freshman year, my daughter had a roommate who was pissed off at being sent to a public university. She handled this by refusing to utter a single word or otherwise acknowledging my daughter's presence all year. Then there was the roommate who shared her bed with her boyfriend every night for a semester. (They moved into my daughter's room after his roommate kicked them out.) My son's roommate who smoked pot with his buddies in the room on a regular basis. The students who regularly greeted 2AM by dropping trash cans off the roof.... then followed up by puking in the hall.

Insert your own horror story here.

Even worse, every year some students get into serious mental health issues; numbing depression, outbreaks of mania, onset of schizophrenia. All too often, the burden of handling this falls onto some well meaning but totally clueless 18 year old roommmate with problems of his own.

The typical university or college, public or private, charges an inordinate amount of money for a room that would land any other landlord in jail, then walks away. Every school has a mental health office, but if the kid never leaves bed due to depression, teachers just hand out an F for excessive absence and move on. Friends and family at home find out about problems only by accident; students are ashamed to admit that a problem exists and it's easy to hide things over the phone. We don't want a return to bed checks, but there has to be a better way.