Virginia Tech's largest all-male residence hall will go co-ed this fall.

Pritchard Hall, the largest male residence hall on the East Coast, houses 1,016 men this academic year. It will house more than 400 women next year to reflect the male-female ratio on campus.

The move is due to a changing gender balance on campus and increased demand for co-ed housing, according to a news release. Female enrollment on the Blacksburg campus has grown from about 40.6 percent to 42.6 percent the past decade.

Men and women will live in separate wings of the building, with the first floor remaining all-male and the seventh floor all-female. Pritchard has undergone recent renovations to prepare for the change, including renovation of bathrooms and refinishing of student rooms.

Ken Belcher, Tech's associate director for occupancy management, said the change will offer the university more flexibility as it deals with crowded residence halls and improve Pritchard's general atmosphere.

"It's tough to put your finger on it exactly," he said of the impact of making residence halls co-ed. "It just balances things out more to match the greater society."

The closing of East Ambler Johnston residence hall for renovations next fall and the opening of New Hall West will result in a temporary loss of 250 beds for Tech, which has had to make accommodations for overbooking the past few years.

Room assignments in Pritchard will be on the basis of academic interest, concentrating students in the same college and with the same majors together.

More than 9,100 of Tech's 27,500 Blacksburg campus students live in residence halls. Several, such as Slusher, Thomas and O'Shaughnessy, have become co-ed in recent years. With Pritchard going co-ed, there will be only six all-male or all-female residence halls left next academic year.

Belcher said the university gets more requests from students for co-ed housing than it can accommodate every year and has been looking into making Pritchard co-ed since the early 1990s. But it wasn't until now that enough women were living on campus to make it possible.

Some universities have allowed men and women to live in neighboring rooms, and the University of Chicago announced last month that it will allow co-ed rooms starting this semester.

"We're not there yet," Belcher said, laughing. "We're not going to be there for a good number of years."