For many adults, the first and last time they willingly submit to living with a total stranger is their freshman year of college. And now is the time of year when many kids, just accepted into college, decide they won’t do it.

Cohabitating with anyone in 150 square feet isn’t easy. It’s hard enough to share a room with someone you love. Their intermittent snores, the way they hum while cleaning or just miss the trash can when flinging dirty tissues.

But forcing kids from widely diverging backgrounds, ethnicities and economic classes to live in close quarters is one of the benefits of a residential college. It’s a social leveler. It offers its own education. It can produce terrible conflict, but that, too, is essential to preparing young people for the world. It’s an important part of learning to get along.

Too many students today miss out on that experience altogether. Although in recent years some schools have pulled back from the practice, many have adopted systems that give students far more control over the process. Students have the option of choosing a roommate on their own, whether they connect in person, on social media or through one of many third-party matching services. Or they use a campus matching service like RoomSync or StarRez, which schools can license and tailor to their needs.

At the University of Arizona, first-year students either pair up on their own or use a program that the administrative director for housing and residential life, Dana Robbins-Murray, described as “Match.com for roommates.”

“This gives students the control over who they live with and where they live,” Robbins-Murray said. “We find it gives them the power to feel more enabled to work through the system because they chose it.”

“The outcome we want is students to have a place that’s safe, comfortable, to feel where they belong,” David Clark, the vice president of campus life at Emory University in Georgia, said. Roughly 55% of Emory’s students start school paired up, whether they met on social media, at a pre-college meetup or knew one another from home. Housing assignments aren’t released until July in order to give freshmen plenty of time to find someone.

Choice. Control. Comfort. Agency. These sound like good things: qualities that might promote a sense of happiness and safety.

But they can also undermine other values and abilities, such as resilience, risk-taking, navigating differences across identity and ideology. It’s one thing for schools to keep night owls away from morning people and avoid clashes over allergies. But college is about encountering the unknown and learning to adapt, even if that means sidestepping a grievously drunk roommate at 3 a.m. Freshman year is when the girl who grew up with a private chef lives with someone whose rare meal out was at IHOP.

The idea that letting kids pair up on their own to improve mental health doesn’t necessarily bear out in the long run.

“Roommate experiences are an intense learning experience,” Molly Newton, the senior associate dean of students at Bates College in Maine, said. “They’re fun and they’re hard.” Bates does not allow students to preselect roommates; instead, administrators handle the matching process themselves.

“College is meant to be a time of life when you step out of your comfort zone and you’re stretched,” says Julie Lythcott-Haims, the author of “Your Turn: How to Be an Adult” and a former dean of first-year students at Stanford University in California. “If people are allowed to choose their own roommates, they’re inherently cutting themselves off from some of the most significant learning available, which is to grow up your freshman year with someone not like you.”

The reality is that when kids choose their own roommates, they tend to go with people who are exactly like themselves. Bruce Sacerdote, an economist at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, has been studying the social effects of college roommates for over a decade. His research points to clear advantages to a randomized process, especially since American campuses still see a lot of homophily or self-segregation by race, ethnicity and class.

“Universities work so hard to achieve diversity, but that’s most valuable if people are actually interacting,” Sacerdote said. “The most powerful tool universities have to foster that is through roommate matches.”

Kids who pair up are often the ones who went to private or elite public feeder schools where they can easily slot in with mutual friends; they’re also the kids who have resources to meet up over the summer. Letting kids choose their own roommates, Lythcott-Haims said, “privileges the privileged, foments cliques and counters the intended outcome of having a diverse student body in that kids learn and grow because of their interactions with each other.”

Recognition of this effect has led some schools, including Duke University in North Carolina, to stop letting first-year students self-select. Even though it’s hard to claw back a privilege that’s already been granted, especially when many colleges treat students more like clients or customers whom they aim to please, now is the time for more colleges to take that step.

After all, with the insular and insulating nature of social media and the emphasis on racial and ethnic identity affinity groups, getting kids out of their bubbles is already an uphill battle.

Today’s divided campuses need students to learn as much as possible about getting along with the kinds of people they don’t know. Kids certainly deserve the chance, too.

Pamela Paul writes a column for the New York Times.

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Not long ago, I presented an argument for long(er) résumés. “Long” being a relative term, I was advocating for résumés that take the space needed to present the candidate’s relevant skills effectively, whether that means a two-page document or something even longer.

My advice comes from both my experience and from common sense: When candidates try to meet arbitrary criteria, they make unfortunate choices. Consider the one-page résumés you’ve seen with tiny type and 0.4 margins. The same content stretched out onto two pages with ample white space is exponentially easier to read. But technically, it’s also twice as long — should recruiters throw that out in favor of the one-pager written for Lilliputians?

If we can agree that the more readable document is the better choice, then we can advance the conversation to the real meat of the issue: How can you best make use of additional space in a résumé?

To answer, it helps to consider who probably won’t benefit from a longer document — that would include workers with a short work history and no special achievements, as well as any worker seeking entry-level or lower-skilled positions. In those situations, the relevant information can be provided well in a short format.

Candidates who do benefit from longer résumés are those with relevant but perhaps diverse skills that need extra context, as well as those with managerial stories to tell, and anyone whose background includes relevant achievements or complex projects.

Have you noticed my repeated use of the word “relevant”? I usually try to find different words to create a smoother reading experience but nothing else fits quite as well. One of the few absolutes that I can accept when it comes to résumés is that the information they contain should be relevant to the reader, as best as the candidate can discern. Using relevance as a guideline ensures the résumé is appropriately long and not just a collection of unedited vignettes.

With the foundation laid for the value and use of longer résumés, here are some thoughts on how to use the extra space to tell your story.

Expand the Experience section: In the effort to trim pages — or to omit all but 10 years of experience while trying to look younger — candidates leave a lot of valuable information on the cutting room floor. If you were to write for meaning and impact rather than length, your job description might include these elements:

Job title, employer, city and dates; one to three sentences of narrative context describing the scope of the job or else the position and scale of the company within its industry; three to five short bulleted sentences describing specific responsibilities, including metrics; a short subsection of two to three bulleted sentences under the subheading, “Achievements.”

How far to go back is a matter of judgment (relevance), but candidates wishing to include earlier work experiences can condense them into a new section called “Additional Experience” where each entry is only one line long. These entries can omit the dates if there’s a concern about ageism, but they can include a brief line of context to show the value of the experience: Managed $100M in assets in a two-person brokerage.

Add a Projects section: Instead of burying important projects in a job description, you can write a brief paragraph about each one and include three or four in a new section where each project is given a short name. For example, “Nonprofit program launch. Researched community need, then identified $800k in donor funding to initiate a program serving … ”

Build out your training information: If you took courses or a degree in an area relevant to your work, that’s reason enough to include a topic list along with the program name. For example: “Associate of Arts in Business, Jackson County College, 2014. Classes included bookkeeping, principles of accounting, business management, and writing for business.”

Add a headline and Summary: Introducing yourself to readers instead of abruptly launching into details about your last job is a use of space that will pay off in multiple ways. For one thing, it lets you control the story by including details in your summary that most flatter you as a candidate. It also allows you to “warm up” the résumé with sentiments such as, “Committed to providing excellent client service while contributing to organizational growth.”

So what do you think: Should your résumé be longer? If you have a short version now, consider experimenting with additional content. You may be surprised by how much impact a longer version can have.

Maybe the least diverse city council in the country – all young women with the same ideology — should hold off just a bit on mandating that all new surface parking lots with at least 15 stalls be made ready with electrical conduits or raceway connections for electric vehicle charging stations.

First of all, I had to look up raceway connections, even as certain as I was that it had nothing to do with the speed at which an EV might be juiced up. A raceway connection is merely an enclosed conduit that provides a physical pathway for the wiring. Got it.

Secondly, the gals presumably share the same ridiculous and unproven idea that electric vehicles will save the Earth from humankind’s footprint. They won’t, nor can most people even afford them. The people who can afford them most typically live in houses, not in the Lego Block square multi-family boxes that are eating up every square inch of St. Paul and whose occupants most often can afford neither the electric vehicle nor a house.

Yes, but our city council might be arguing that “soon the manufacturers will be producing new low-cost EVs to meet the growing demand and when they do, we’ll be ready.”

What growing demand? The manufacturers want out of this misguided folly. The manufacturers are losing their shirts on these EVs. They are cutting back production, not hustling to make cheaper ones.

If consumers want an EV, more power to them, an unavoidable pun considering the unimaginable strain on a currently inadequate electric grid if the country went all in on EVs. We’d be lucky to have a working toaster, much less lights and heat.

But our parking lots will be ready. Which brings us to hopefully holding off on this mandate. Do you really want to put more copper wiring on the streets? Our feral thieves don’t need a new supply of copper. They are currently feasting on streetlights, leaving many of them with sprung access panels and debris on the boulevards from the innards not worth stealing.

Gov. Tim Walz and Mayor Melvin Carter met out at Como Regional Park the other day and stared forlornly at some deadened streetlights, apparently meeting to tout a new legislative proposal to require anyone selling copper metal to have a state-issued license. There really is no way at the scrap yard to tell where the wire comes from or if it is stolen.

A license might help, but it presupposes a car full of feral thieves will spot a streetlight not yet molested and say, “Gee, guys, we better not break that one apart. We don’t have a license.”

The way we are governed by a trifecta of DFL unicorns I’m surprised the legislation doesn’t call for holding the manufacturers of the streetlights responsible for primitive design work that failed to anticipate the theft of the wire.

Something better work. Too many streets are eerily dark, too many sidewalks troubled by shadow. Theft of wire last year from streetlights cost us $1.2 million, and the amount is growing.

In the meantime, the streetlights that are working are left on 24 hours a day, even on the sunniest days. I guess if you tried to strip a live one, you could get electrocuted.

The council should reconsider their mandate on charging stations before all that wire disappears. Might as well wait to see if a demand actually materializes.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

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America’s approach to health care is an outlier among the world’s rich countries, and not in a good way. Extraordinarily complex and hideously expensive, it still manages to leave some 26 million people without coverage. The Affordable Care Act of 2010 made notable progress, but failed to solve the pressing problems of high costs and less-than-universal access.

The ACA fell short partly because legislators dropped the so-called public option. This idea should be revived. The dysfunction in Washington makes such innovation difficult at the federal level, but states have been trying variants. These experiments are worth watching.

The need for more reform is clear. The US spends about 17% of gross domestic product on health care, half as much again as comparable countries — yet on many metrics, including life expectancy, U.S. outcomes are worse. The system’s enormous cost is partly hidden because most Americans are insured through their employers: The premiums suppress wages, so the true hit to families’ finances is disguised. Even covered employees can be on the hook for additional charges, enough in some cases to pay for a small car.

Workers fear that losing their jobs will mean they lose their insurance too. More than half of the 20 million who’ve signed up for Obamacare in 2024 complain of high monthly costs and out-of-pocket spending. And despite the ACA, roughly 10% of Americans still have no coverage at all.

When Obamacare was taking shape, some lawmakers envisioned a public option — a government-run plan that would compete alongside private insurance. Like Medicare, it would save money by negotiating prices and cutting costs. Voters liked the idea, but it met stiff industry opposition and was ultimately scrapped. During his presidential campaign a decade later, Joe Biden supported a public option, but his administration has focused on other ways to make health care more affordable.

Yet the public option wasn’t quite dead: As a result of the ACA, states have been able to try “innovative strategies” to lower costs and broaden coverage. Three have used it to advance programs they’re calling public options, and a handful of others have plans underway.

Colorado’s scheme is especially popular, thanks to generous benefits (including free primary and mental-health care) and lower premiums than many marketplace plans. State law requires insurers to meet annual premium-reduction targets, and the insurers negotiate hard with hospitals to cut costs. If they miss the targets, insurers and providers alike can be summoned to public hearings. The state has also introduced a reinsurance program to defray the cost of expensive claims.

Admittedly, schemes like Colorado’s depart from the original public-option idea, which relies on competition from a gradually expanding Medicare, not price controls. The old-school public option still has a lot to recommend it: Use Medicare’s systems and provider network to gradually extend affordable coverage — with premiums set to recover full actuarial costs, offset by ACA subsidies for eligible households. A plan called Medicare-X, championed by Sens. Michael Bennet and Tim Kaine, would work in this way. The aim of such proposals isn’t to replace private insurance, as some “single payer” schemes envisage, or to regulate some private offerings more tightly state by state (as in Colorado’s plan), but to broaden access to affordable choices.

However conceived, public options will face setbacks. Health-care reform is administratively demanding and politically fraught. Absent rules compelling participation, hospitals and providers could refuse to see patients if reimbursement rates fall too low, leaving areas with less coverage and weaker competition. Nobody says this will be easy.

Yet the existing system is undeniably failing. In poll after poll, Americans say rising health-care costs are a top concern. States should keep on trying new approaches to see what works. And Washington should put the Medicare-based public option — perhaps the most promising way to solve the system’s biggest problems — back on the agenda.

— The Bloomberg Opinion editorial board

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