Holy Family School

SINCE the very first bunk bed, roommates have annoyed each other. They leave their clothes all over the floor; they host overnight guests unannounced. Big deal. You tell them to pick up their stuff; you work out a “sexile” schedule.

But housing officials say that lately they are noticing something different: students seem to lack the will, and skill, to address these ordinary conflicts. “We have students who are mad at each other and they text each other in the same room,” says Tom Kane, director of housing at Appalachian State University, in Boone, N.C. “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 seething that can boil over into frustration and anger. At the University of Florida, emotional outbursts occur about once a week, says Norbert Dunkel, the university’s director of housing and residence education.

“It used to be: ‘Let’s sit down and talk about it,’ ” he says. “Over the past five years, roommate conflicts have intensified. 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 cellphones 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? Facebook creates even more friction as complaints go public. “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.”

Dissatisfied students rarely take up an offer from a resident adviser to mediate, Mr. Pysz says. “With mediation you have to have buy-in from both,” he says. “We don’t have a lot of mediation. We have a lot of avoidance.”

In recent focus groups at North Carolina State University, dorm residents said they would not even confront noisy neighbors on their floor.

“It was clear from the focus groups that the students expect the R.A.’s to keep the floors quiet,” says Susan Grant, the university’s director of housing.

Administrators point to parents who have fixed their children’s problems their entire lives. Now in college, the children lack the skills to attend to even modest conflicts. Some parents continue to intervene on campus.

“I can’t tell you the number of times I am talking to a student and thinking I am making headway and the student gets out their phone and says, ‘Can you talk to my mom about this?’ ” Mr. Kane says. Or housing officials field calls from parents pleading or demanding that the college get involved in a dispute, only for the officials to discover that the dispute was little more than a minor irritation, if anything.

Constant cellphone connection means parents jump in too quickly, says Sarah English, director of housing and residential life at Marist College, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. Some go directly to the source, Ms. English says: “It surprises me when students say, ‘My roommate’s mother called and yelled at me,’ and I think, ‘Are you kidding me?’ I can’t believe parents call students. Ten years ago, I never heard of that.”

With avoidance often comes escalation.

With the trend toward smaller families, many new undergraduates may never have shared a bedroom with a sibling. Without that experience, students don’t know how to negotiate potential areas of friction like keeping the room in (relative) order, watching a roommate’s television or borrowing an iPod.

Ryan Melson and Matt Blumenreich had their own bedrooms at home before rooming together as freshmen at Grinnell College in Iowa. They really hit it off. They both played on the baseball team and encouraged each other through long nights of studying during a grueling first semester. But Mr. Melson is a neat freak, and Mr. Blumenreich, by his own admission, is “the opposite.” Quite the opposite.

Mr. Melson says: “I just wanted him to clear a path so I could walk over to my stuff. I always had my own room and had it clean. I didn’t know how to handle it.”

Finally in October, he had had enough. “Hey, man, can you just move your stuff!” he said, clearly upset.

“It didn’t sound very nice,” he remembers. “I really wish I could have taken that back.”