John Garvey, the president of the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., explains why they’re going back to single-sex dorms — because intellect and virtue are connected:
Here is one 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.
The point about sex is no surprise. The point about drinking is. I would have thought that young women would have a civilizing influence on young men. Yet the causal arrow seems to run the other way. Young women are trying to keep up — and young men are encouraging them (maybe because it facilitates hooking up).
Yeah, maybe drinking facilitates “hooking up”…
I’m a bit surprised a Catholic university ever moved away from single-sex dorms.
In my own not-at-all-Catholic university experience, the coed dorms seemed very forced, with everyone pretending that it was simultaneously perfectly natural yet nothing perfectly natural would come of it.
The dorm complex did have one all-male dorm though, filled with unfortunate souls, and one all-female dorm, filled with volunteers — or, at least, their parents volunteered them for it.
That all-male dorm had no House Mom or Drill Sergeant to knock some sense into the guys, so it rapidly descended into chaos — holes in the walls, anything and everything disposed of in those walls, etc.
The all-female dorm smelled like lavender.
Anyway, the young men became truly unruly, without any civilizing influences. The young women didn’t, but they weren’t a random sample — so I don’t know how valuable any stats on them might be.
I wonder if that study controlled for the possibility that students who were willing to be in a single-sex dorm were by nature more conservative than those who wanted to be in co-ed dorms.
Also, the statement “I would have thought young women would have a civilizing effect on young men” is quaintly 19th century. Recent studies have demonstrated that high school girls are now the ones most likely to initiate sex.
I was also charmed by his notion that it is boys who are encouraging girls to drink because then they get what they want. Given the study I cited above, I think that it is obvious that girls are drinking more with boys because it gets them what they (girls) want.
If you constantly tell girls “don’t wait for Prince Charming” and “take what you want”, this is what you get.
As someone who’s lived in both single sex and mixed places, my opinion is that
1. Having girls around results in boys indulging in less horseplay type fighting, less outright vandalism, less living like a pig, and less sheer crudity in regular conversation.
2. Having girls around also results in more serious violence, more sex, and more situations that get totally out of hand.
3. No effect on levels of drinking were observed.
YMMV
So, in the presence of the fairer sex, the young men contain many of their smaller stupid impulses but try more really stupid stunts. Is that net positive or negative? I suppose the problem is that they have no outlet for positive risk-taking.