The Wall Street Journal-20080131-Where Is the Love- Students Eschew Campus Romance

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Where Is the Love? Students Eschew Campus Romance

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Like many campuses, Purdue University has some traditional hot spots for romance -- "The Old Pump," where couples used to meet after dark, and a bell tower known as a lucky place to propose marriage.

But engineering major Amy Penner has been so busy volunteering with a women's engineering group and planning her career that she's only dimly aware of them. Her boyfriend has left campus to get a doctorate overseas; asked how much time she spends dating, she says, "That would be zero."

Remember the movie "Love Story" and its star-crossed student lovers? Such torrid campus romances may be becoming a thing of the past. College life has become so competitive, and students so focused on careers, that many aren't looking for spouses anymore.

Replacing college as the top marital hunting ground is the office. Only 14% of people who are married or in a relationship say they met their partners in school or college, says a 2006 Harris Interactive study of 2,985 adults; 18% met at work. That's a reversal from 15 years ago, when 23% of married couples reported meeting in school or college and only 15% cited work, according to a 1992 study of 3,432 adults by the University of Chicago.

Gone are the days when sororities and dorms marked engagements with candle-passing ceremonies while men serenaded beneath the windows.

Even at tradition-steeped Transylvania University, a 228-year-old institution in Lexington, Ky., an old white ash called "The Kissing Tree," cited in 2003 by the Chronicle of Higher Education as one of the most romantic spots on campuses, is no longer an "icon of intimacy," says Richard Thompson, a longtime Transylvania professor and dean. Lucie Hartmann, 21, a senior, says "no one utilizes" the spot for romance; like most students, she's intent on "using college to set a foundation for a career."

Researchers cite a couple of factors. Young adults are delaying marriage, for one thing. In the past 15 years, men's median age at first marriage has risen by 1.2 years to 27.5, and by 1.4 years for women, to 25.5, the highest in more than a century, Census Bureau data show.

Also at work is "credential inflation" -- an increase in the qualifications required for many skilled jobs, says Janet Lever, a sociology professor at California State University, Los Angeles. Many young adults want the flexibility to relocate freely and immerse themselves in new work and educational opportunities before making room for marriage and family. As a result, students favor "light relationships that aren't going to compromise where they go to grad school or which job they take," she says.

Cody Cheetham, 22, a Purdue senior, is looking for a marketing job after she graduates in May and plans on getting an MBA. "A lot of us don't even know where we're going to be living six months after we graduate," she says. "We don't want to bring another person into the chaos of our lives."

If you're a parent, as I am, you may be wondering what all this means. Such sordid campus-life portrayals as Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons" aside, the news about students' social lives isn't all bad. To be sure, the "hookup culture" -- the campus trend toward casual sexual behavior, usually linked with alcohol and no expectations of a continuing relationship -- is rife. Some 76% of college students have engaged in hookups, which usually stop short of intercourse, according to a study of 4,000 students by Stanford University sociology professor Paula England. Students report having had an average 6.9 hookups and only 4.4 traditional dates by their senior year.

On the bright side, more students are having fun on group dates; also, deep, but platonic, male-female friendships are more common.

Many young adults return to traditional dating after graduation, says Kathleen Bogle, author of a new book, "Hooking Up," based on a study of 76 students and recent alumni. Young adults "want to find a quality person, a good person," to marry, says Ms. Bogle, an assistant sociology professor at La Salle University in Philadelphia, "and traditional dating is seen as a better way to do that" than hooking up.

With the benefit of hindsight, though, some grads may yearn for the stretches of time on campus for extracurricular activities and studying with the opposite sex. Julia Vasiliauskas broke up with her boyfriend at the University of Rochester in New York soon after her 2003 graduation, then went to grad school and began teaching near Seattle. Now that she feels ready, at 26, to find a partner, "I regret that I didn't find that person in college -- because now that I'm working, I don't have time."

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