Odds in Favor of College Men in Dating (and Hooking Up with) Women on Campus

It’s been a few years since a startling gender gap began to show at American universities. At many schools in the United States, women comprise 66 percent of the student population. The increasing scarcity of men on campus has created a buyer’s market that favors college men. Translation: It’s statistically easier for college men to land dates with women and get casual sex on campus. 

Those are the findings Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying by sociologists Mark Regerus and Jeremy Uecker. Part of the reason that sex is easier to find on campus has do with changing mores and the emergence of hookup culture in society. The authors emphasize the "sexual economics" of the situation on campus with a supply-and-demand analogy. Far fewer men on campus means more demand for them as sexual partners by women.

And all young men - both in college and outside of college - can look forward to a future in which there is far less pressure to marry, coming both from society and a from women.

“One of the things you’ll continue to see is people delaying marriage because they can’t seem to find commitment in their mid-20s. Such commitment is just not required of men to access sex. We should witness a trend toward slightly fewer people marrying, at later ages, and the emergence of an almost institutionalized pattern of cohabitation as a concession to the commitments that are being desired but delayed. That’s my hunch, although the future is obviously unknown,” Regerus said in a recent interview. 

At MensPsychology.com we are ambivalent about the net effect of this trend. While it's good for young men to get dates and have success with women, the overall effect of the hookup culture probably has a deleterious effect on relationships. MensPsychology has dedicated one of its programs to teaching men how to conduct a healthy courtship (in the scientific sense) with a woman, one that includes strong sexual attraction and also strong friendship and partnership.

Also of concern, the authors found evidence that the hookup culture and trends toward increased casual sex are not particularly good for young women. For example, the more sexual partners a woman has had, the more likely it is that she is depressed, the authors found.