Yale’s $21,600 per year residential colleges force students into uncomfortable, unwanted situations.
A gender neutral bathroom in Benjamin Franklin College. (Credit: Michelle Zheng)
Michelle Zheng
Managing Editor, The Buckley Beacon
Yale’s housing policy is, on paper, neutral. The lottery is random. The bathroom alternation applies everywhere. Nobody is officially being singled out. This is the story Yale tells itself. It is not the whole story.
Eva Rosenberg, a sophomore in Benjamin Franklin College studying electrical engineering and computer science, was strongly opposed to living on a gender-inclusive floor, but a late lottery number left her on one. Eva claims that on the housing form, she set her preference to a women’s only bathroom floor. However, she received a mixed gender bathroom floor.
Mixed-gender housing at Yale traces back to 2007, when members of the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Cooperative and the Yale College Council began lobbying the administration for the option to have university housing free of gender restrictions. An ad hoc administrative committee took up the question in January 2008, and the Council of Masters (Heads of College) endorsed extending the option to juniors and seniors the following February.
During the 2011-2012 year, YDN and YCC activism pushed to expand gender-neutral housing to the sophomore class, arguing that gender-neutral spaces would reduce stigma and help LGBTQ+ students feel less “othered.” The expansion effort slowly continued over the next several years: by Spring 2015, sophomores had the option for mixed-gender suites. Mixed-gender bathrooms, not just suites, followed shortly after. By January 2019, the option had quietly been extended to first-years as well, with no formal campus-wide announcement.
Now in 2026, Yale’s room draw unfolds in four stages. Students first declare whether they will live on campus, then form housing groups sized to the suites available in their college. When more groups apply for a suite size than there are suites, a pre-lottery decides which groups stay intact; the rest are disbanded and must regroup into whatever configurations remain. Finally, each group is randomly assigned a 15-minute appointment to choose from the suites still available.
According to Yale Housing, “Bathroom designations are not part of that process.” The university’s housing policy instead tells students to consider bathroom options when choosing a suite. But for students at the bottom of the lottery, including women who are uncomfortable with shared bathrooms or have religious objections to them, there may be nothing left to consider.
For those students, the Yale Housing website offers one answer: they can always find a suitable bathroom “by heading up- or downstairs.”
Last semester while Eva was scrambling to find a solution to her placement in a mixed gender bathroom, she contacted her residential college dean for help. Deans, she learned, are not permitted to intervene in housing decisions.
So Rosenberg emailed Yale Housing directly. Her group, she said, was told it should have taken bathroom designations into account during room selection. By the time their appointment came, she said, every option that fit their preferences was gone.
“It felt like a lack of planning,” Eva said. “Or a lack of tending to all preferences. Some things should be filtered before the lottery even begins.”
Now a sophomore, Eva faces a daily choice: use the gender-inclusive bathroom on her floor, which she described as “violating” and “very uncomfortable,” or walk to a women’s bathroom on another floor to shower.
Rosenberg’s account is one of five The Beacon collected from students across four residential colleges who said Yale’s bathroom-designation system left them without the preferences they had requested.
Unexpected Commitment to Mixed Gender Bathrooms
Before students ever reach the sophomore housing lottery, many encounter the problem for the first time as freshmen: when they are 18 years old, new to campus, and have no framework yet for understanding if Yale, in this particular matter, will look out for them.
A first-year in Silliman College arrived on campus last fall expecting what the housing form had seemed to promise: an all-female bathroom floor. She and her roommates had indicated that preference clearly. What she found instead, sometime after move-in, was that a male upperclassman had also been assigned to their bathroom.
She didn’t find out right away. That was part of what made it disorienting. Freshmen move in before upperclassmen. By the time she realized what had happened, she was already living inside an arrangement no one had warned her about. The first sign was running into his friend, a complete and total stranger, in the bathroom.
She came from a traditional household. Her parents didn’t know. “I didn’t feel like stressing them out about it,” she said. “That’s just not something they’re comfortable with: their daughter sharing a bathroom with a man.” She was 18, navigating a new city, a new school, and a bathroom situation her family would have been horrified by. Yale’s contribution to solving this was nothing.
The students on the floor eventually worked it out among themselves, because they had no other choice. They made an informal rule: if the main bathroom door was closed, no one could enter. It held, more or less. But the point is that an 18-year-old woman, weeks into her first semester at college, had to negotiate bathroom access with a male stranger because Yale placed them both there and walked away. The institution that admitted her, that cashes her tuition check, that sends glossy brochures about community and belonging, and that institution left her to figure it out on her own.
She tried suggesting once that he use the male bathroom on another floor. He pushed back, reasonably claiming that it was inconvenient for him to go to another floor.
Religious Objections Disregarded
For a Muslim student in Benjamin Franklin College, heading up- or downstairs is impractical.
She and her three suitemates submitted their bathroom preference on the housing portal last fall. All four of them indicated that they preferred gender exclusive bathroom. By March, when their lottery number finally came up, every suite with a gender-exclusive bathroom was gone. When the first-year reached out to her First-Year Counselor afterward, she was told there was nothing that could be done.
“I thought it was implied,” she told the Beacon in an interview. “If we all clicked no on gender-neutral bathrooms, we would be given rooms that followed that requirement.”
She is a Muslim woman. The bathroom is not, for her, a matter of mild preference. It is a religious requirement.
Another senior in Jonathan Edwards, a Muslim student who wears a hijab, has spent four years quietly managing a housing system that was not built with her in mind.
Most years, she received the housing she needed, but all of it was contingent on circumstances she couldn’t control. This year, her luck ran out.
She drew a standalone single for senior year. The floor it sits on has a mixed-gender bathroom. The female-only bathroom is a flight of stairs away. Every morning now involves a calculation.
“If I want to use the mixed-gender bathroom, I basically have to wear my scarf at all times — that includes post-showering, hair still wet,” the senior explained. The alternative is a large robe and bolting up and down the stairs.
“There’s a difference,” she said, “between going out in the hall three paces down and going up and down a couple of stairs.” The difference is that stairwells are public spaces, with unknown students frequently traveling in them— and there’s no way to tell if they are empty or not before entering.
As a senior, this student has been vocal about her preferences throughout her four years at Yale, but despite her efforts, no solution was actually offered to her.
In response to a series of questions from The Beacon, Yale housing said:
“Yale Housing provides a list of bathroom designations so that students can take bathroom designations and locations into account when selecting suites, just as they consider other factors such as suite configuration, location in the college, or floor. Some groups may prioritize selecting a suite on a floor that has a certain bathroom designation. Groups with lower lottery numbers may find that no available suites are on a floor with their preferred bathroom designation, just as they may find there are no available suites in their desired suite size, room configuration, or location. Students are able to use any restroom in their entryway and can always access a designated women’s, men’s, or gender-inclusive bathroom by heading up or downstairs. “
The JE senior is on a full scholarship. Moving off campus — the implicit release valve Yale offers to students unhappy with their placements, noted on the off-campus living page — is not available to her. New Haven rents are high. The financial aid process for off-campus living is, in her words, obscure. For students with money, a bad housing draw is an inconvenience. For students without it, a bad housing draw is something they have to live with, literally, for a year.
“I don’t like the options? Well, tough,” she said. “I have to pick one.”
She has a theory about why gender-inclusive floors have become the default rather than the opt-in exception at Yale. It is not, she believes, principally about inclusion. It is about what is easiest for an administration with thousands of students to house and limited appetite for the friction that comes with honoring their individual needs.
“They try to dress it up,” she said. “We’re breaking down barriers, destigmatizing gender differences. But I genuinely believe they do this because it’s easier for them. They are trying to cram as many students on campus as possible, and this is the path of least resistance.”
Four years at Yale. A full scholarship. A religious identity that has required constant, exhausting navigation of a system built for someone else. And she has arrived at a conclusion that is not angry so much as settled – the conclusion of someone who has run out of reasons to expect anything different.
She said, “I have zero faith in Yale housing,” she said. “They have taken the easy way out.”
None of the students interviewed for this story objected to gender-neutral bathrooms existing. Rather, they felt that their preferences were systematically ignored by the university, and that they were not given appropriate alternative options.