It's too early to sing a swan song for those extra-long, extra-skinny college dorm beds that today's boomer parents might remember. But as campus housing goes more upscale, more students are sleeping on bigger beds.

Students at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth are about to move into new residence halls featuring full-size, or double, beds. The dorm with the longest waiting list at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff is a 3-year-old apartment complex that boasts full beds. The University of North Carolina-Greensboro recently began building a residence hall that will have full beds.

The larger sizes reflect a growing demand for more and better amenities, housing officials say. Today's students "didn't share their bedroom with siblings, and didn't have a single bed" at home, said Don Kamalsky, Case Western housing director. "It's just reality."

The trend apparently has not made its way to Hawai'i.

University of Hawai'i-Manoa has not made the switch to full-size beds in its approximately 3,000 dorm rooms, said Jim Manke, UH-Manoa spokesman. A renovation project that will add 1,700 beds by 2009 is in its planning stages, said Manke. It would be up to the developer, American Campus Communities, and UH officials to decide whether to go with larger beds.

Chaminade University also uses the typical dorm-size bed but does provide larger beds for students on request, said Kapono Ryan, Chaminade spokeswoman.

Case Western senior and residence hall association president Andrew Powelson, 21, cautioned against anyone getting the wrong idea about the bigger beds.

While they are a nice perk, "I don't think it's meant to be, 'Oh, you have a bigger bed, and you invite people over to spend the night,' " he said. "It's like a substitute for a couch ... a convenient place to study."

The shift started about 10 years ago as schools moved toward apartment-style dorms, said Cecil Phillips, of Place Properties, an Atlanta-based developer of student housing. "When you expand the envelope of space in a bigger bedroom, and you put in a twin bed, it looks funny," said Phillips, whose early full-bed clients include South Carolina's Clemson University and State University of West Georgia in Carrollton.

Not all schools buy into the idea. Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, offers apartment-style housing but is sticking with twin beds, which "are quite a bit less expensive to purchase, even in bulk," said Joellen Tipton, director of residence life.

Case is offering the bigger beds only to juniors and seniors. When the school builds a new freshman dorm, probably in a few years, "we're still going to do single beds," Kamalsky said.