Rating the dating on college campuses

In honor of Sunday’s warm-and-fuzzy holiday, it seems fitting to discuss dating in college. The New York Times recently published an insightful article about how the skewed female to male ratios at most universities affect dating culture. Overall, the ratio remains approximately 60:40 (female: male).

Anyway, as described in the NYT, this can make for a rather quirky dating culture on college campuses. When I saw this article, I went “Yes! Finally!” because I think that dating in college is something that a) every college student has thought about and b) few college students/alumni want to discuss. It’s awkward. It’s uncomfortable. It forces us to acknowledge the expectations that we had for college that may not have been met. It’s real life.

I definitely had high expectations for dating and social life in college. After years of reading Seventeen magazine and absorbing all of the promises that pop culture had to offer, I assumed that college would automatically include first dates, clichéd strolls on the quad, and essentially the first big romantic relationship that so many people presume comes with the rest of the higher education package.

I was wrong. I quickly became familiar with “hookup culture” and realized that actual relationships in college now seem to emerge from a complex gray zone of parties, group dynamics, and a little too much time spent on Facebook. It was way more complicated than what I was prepared for and, to be honest, kind of overwhelming and stressful.

Reading the article from the Times, however, brings it all back. Before reading the article, I never really thought about how the skewed female to male ratio could put women in a position of heightened vulnerability, but it does make sense and it totally fits with behavior I saw all the time as an undergrad. I’ve seen some incredibly smart, savvy young women compromise their choices simply because they were afraid of losing a boyfriend or even potential boyfriend—and then when I’ve talked with my guy friends about this, it’s like we’re living in entirely separate worlds. I do believe that many of the dynamics described in the article do not derive from negative intentions on the part of male college students—from what I have seen, they simply are not aware of how different it is for the female counterparts.

The article cites sociologist Kathleen A. Bogle, who comments that in university settings with so many more women than men, “… [women] are competing for men on men’s terms…Since college women say they generally want ‘something more’ than just a casual hook-up, women end up losing out.”

This is an interesting statement and I would be cautious to “blame” college men for the prevalence of hookup culture. I think it probably resulted from a great many factors. The most important point that I want to draw from this article is that dating on college campuses is simply not what many incoming freshmen expect. Then those expectations often seem to get warped by whatever dating culture exists on a given campus. It differs greatly from college to college depending on size, location, and other factors, but this is surely a topic worthy of further discussion.

The Times article also touched on the differences between various types of schools and I think that it would be interesting to see parallel articles written specifically about these different campuses: small schools vs. big schools, city schools vs. suburban or rurally-located campuses.

Let’s hear what you think. How would you characterize the dating culture on your college campus? What do you think of Dr. Bogle’s assessment?