You’ve just arrived on your new campus, your home for the next four years. It’s a place of opportunity: internships, friends, classes and new experiences. By your side is the person who’s been there through it all, your best friend from high school. With the security of a familiar face by your side, you think you’re ready to tackle the adult world.

But reality often hits harder than expected. It’s three months later, and you’ve unearthed some of your friend’s less-than-palatable traits: they talk on the phone all night, leave their clothes all over the floor and have made a habit of creating foul microwaved concoctions in your room. Even worse, because you were relying solely on each other since the beginning of the year, you struggled to make deeper connections with others.

Thankfully, this isn’t your situation (yet). With college coming up, it’s vital to understand that rooming with your high school best friend isn’t always the best option. The aim of going to college is, of course, to learn and secure a degree, but it’s also to meet new people. 

While you may feel most comfortable with your best friend, rooming with someone new will invite many more social opportunities. You’ll both make your own friends, neither of you feeling a need to stick wholly with one another, potentially allowing you to make double the friends if they bring their new pals by. Nevertheless, you’ll probably still want to stay close to your best friends from high school. But sharing a dorm with them is not necessary to stay connected, and can even make you spend too much time together, potentially leading to getting sick of one another.

According to research by Cassie McMillian et al., “Friends Forever? Correlates of High School Friendship (In)stability from Adolescence to Young Adulthood”, friendship dissolution is frequent after high school, with only 35% of friendships reported remaining intact one year later. As you enter college, you grow into a new person. While you may long to hold onto these relationships, it’s natural for friendships to fade as you get older, and that isn’t necessarily a bad thing as you evolve into your truest self. Rooming with your friend won’t prevent you two from growing into different people, and in some cases could even exacerbate the underlying cracks in friendships due to the constant proximity

One could argue that rooming with a friend would make you feel more comfortable and reduce stress going into college, having a reliable relationship pre-established. However, it’s beneficial to get out of your comfort zone, and staying with a friend could isolate you from forming new relationships with your peers. It’s like going to a restaurant and only ordering the same thing every time: It may be comforting and familiar, but you’re missing out on exploring a whole new world of choices that could be just as, if not more, delicious.

If you plan to go to the same college as a friend, you should set clear boundaries and make agreements with them to ensure that they’re on the same page about balancing making new friendships and maintaining old ones. According to a May 2026 Bark survey, 53% of Redwood students would not room with their high school best friend in college. By not rooming but checking in every month for study sessions and over breaks in the first year of college, you can keep your friendships and also branch out to form new ones.