Housing officials say that lately they are noticing something different: students seem to lack the will and the skill, to address ordinary conflicts. "We have students who are mad at each other and they text each other in the same room," says a teacher. "So many of our roommate conflicts are because kids don't know how to negotiate a problem."
And as any pop psychologist will tell you, bottled emotions lead to silent discontent that can boil over into frustration and anger. At the University of Florida, emotional outbursts occur about once a week, the university's director of housing and residence education says. "It used to be: 'Let's sit down and talk about it.'" he says. "Over the past five years, roommate conflicts have increased. The students don't have the person-to-person discussions and they don't know how to handle them." The problem is most dramatic among freshmen; housing professionals say they see improvement as students move toward graduation, but some never seem to catch on, and they worry about how such students will deal with conflicts after college.
Administrators speculate that reliance on cell phones and the Internet may have made it easier for young people to avoid uncomfortable encounters. Why express anger in person when you can vent in a text? "Things are posted on someone's wall on Facebook: Oh, my roommate kept me up all night studying," says Dana Pysz, an assistant director in the office of residential life at the University of California, Los Angeles. "It's a different way to express their conflict to each other, consequently creating even more frictions as complaints go public." In recent focus groups at North Carolina State University, dorm residents said they would not even confront noisy neighbors on their floor.
Administrators point to parents who have fixed their children's problems in their entire lives. Now in college, the children lack the skills to attend to even modest conflicts. Some parents continue to interfere on campus.
