Monday, June 13, 2011

Countercultural reversal

What's old is new again. I doubt that very many parents, or adults in college towns, would object to this reform. The president of The Catholic University of America, John Garvey, explains "Why We're Going Back to Single-Sex Dorms.":
.... Alcohol-related accidents are the leading cause of death for young adults aged 17-24. Students who engage in binge drinking (about two in five) are 25 times more likely to do things like miss class, fall behind in school work, engage in unplanned sexual activity, and get in trouble with the law. They also cause trouble for other students, who are subjected to physical and sexual assault, suffer property damage and interrupted sleep, and end up babysitting problem drinkers.

Hooking up is getting to be as common as drinking. Sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox, who heads the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, says that in various studies, 40%-64% of college students report doing it. ....

...[O]ne simple step colleges can take to reduce both binge drinking and hooking up: Go back to single-sex residences.

I know it's countercultural. More than 90% of college housing is now co-ed. But Christopher Kaczor at Loyola Marymount points to a surprising number of studies showing that students in co-ed dorms (41.5%) report weekly binge drinking more than twice as often as students in single-sex housing (17.6%). Similarly, students in co-ed housing are more likely (55.7%) than students in single-sex dorms (36.8%) to have had a sexual partner in the last year—and more than twice as likely to have had three or more. ....

Next year all freshmen at The Catholic University of America will be assigned to single-sex residence halls. The year after, we will extend the change to the sophomore halls. It will take a few years to complete the transformation. .... [more]
John Garvey: Why We're Going Back to Single-Sex Dorms - WSJ.com

1 comment:

  1. Seems to me that students who would chose a college with single sex dorms may be less inclined toward drinking and sex, so the type of dorm may not be causal, but merely inidicitive.

    But my statistical studies were several decades ago...

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