While it makes sense to keep the messy students and the smokers together, something is lost by such precise sorting. Conley cites a 2002 Cornell study that found that white students who were assigned a roommate from a different race were more open-minded about race by the end of the year. That’s just one example of the peer-to-peer learning that takes place over the course of a semester, where students figure out how to get along with someone perhaps very different from themselves.
