Where Have All The Good Collegiate Dudes Gone?

One of the best parts of my college experience at NYU was sampling from the buffet of dudes on campus. It seemed like eligible men were lurking behind every dorm room door, in every lecture hall, and at every bump-and-grind dance party. College life was rife with men, whether they ended up becoming friends or more. There were certainly enough to go around. Apparently, this is not the case for the new generation of college ladies. According to The New York Times, women are totally outnumbering men on campus. The stats say that female enrollment is up to about 57 percent at most major universities (except the Ivys, where men still outnumber women) since the 2000s. So what does that mean for collegiate dating life? It means it’s in crisis.

While we’re happy that so many ladies are going to college and all, the gender imbalance seems to be skewing young people’s perspective dating. How? A senior at the University of North Carolina put it well. “Out of that 40 percent [of guys on campus], there are maybe 20 percent that we would consider, and out of those 20, 10 have girlfriends,” she said. “So all the girls are fighting over that other 10 percent.” This is putting young boys in prime position to pillage the playing field and leading women to “meet someone and go home for the night and just hope for the best the next morning” or “feel pressured to do more than they’re comfortable with to lock it down,” according to a female student. In addition to using sex to try to land a relationship—obviously a bad tactic—girls report that they are making exceptions to keep an existing relationship alive, such as letting cheating incidents go or other douchebag behaviors slide.

This news makes me really sad. I’ve always thought that college should be a time to explore love and relationships with a sense of optimism and freedom. You have so many years of your adult life to be jaded about love—why start so early? Of more concern to me is the mentality that this creates for young men and women entering the adult dating world. Men will be deluded into thinking that women will be OK with being treated like garbage and women will think that they have to settle for idiotic guys. So while they may be passing their classes, young people seem to be failing at love. [New York Times]

Is this the experience on your campus? Please share your stories in the comments.