The New Math on Campus

The New York Times ran an interesting article earlier this weekend about the sex ratio on college campuses and how it is wreaking havoc with the social lives of the female undergraduates.  The entire article is worth a read, but here are a few highlights:

Jayne Dallas, a senior studying advertising who was seated across the table, grumbled that the population of male undergraduates was even smaller when you looked at it as a dating pool. “Out of that 40 percent, there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those 20, 10 have girlfriends, so all the girls are fighting over that other 10 percent,” she said.

Needless to say, this puts guys in a position to play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a commitment come with storied romantic histories. Rachel Sasser, a senior history major at the table, said that before she and her boyfriend started dating, he had “hooked up with a least five of my friends in my sorority — that I know of.”

…

“A lot of my friends will meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning,” Ms. Lynch said. “They’ll text them and say: ‘I had a great time. Want to hang out next week?’ And they don’t respond.”

Even worse, “Girls feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with, to lock it down,” Ms. Lynch said.

As for a man’s cheating, “that’s a thing that girls let slide, because you have to,” said Emily Kennard, a junior at North Carolina. “If you don’t let it slide, you don’t have a boyfriend.”

It’s very interesting that things like this are now being talked about openly in the media.  Of course there is still language in the article about how the men are “victimizing” women because of the sex ratio, but that’s as absurd as saying that the young professional women in Manhattan are “victimizing” their male peers by dating and sexing several notches up the social totem pole.  What comes around goes around, ladies.

Tagged as: higher education, hypergamy, sex ratio