Study Shows Co-Ed College Housing Increases Risky Behavior
If your child is leaving for college in August, be prepared for some changes since your days at the university. Long gone are the curfews and house mothers of college dormitories a few decades ago. Dorms on campus are now co-ed, with both female and male students living not only in the same building, but often on the same floor.
The Journal of American College Health recently published a study with some new findings about the effects of co-ed housing on the choices of American college students. The study focused on data for 500 students on five different college campuses.
The students had not chosen their type of housing, but were placed there by the university. The students who were placed in co-ed housing were 2.5 times more likely to binge drink on a weekly basis than their counterparts in all-male or all-female housing.
42 percent of students who lived in co-ed housing reported that they participated in binge drinking every week, while 18 percent of those in gender-specific housing engaged in binge drinking weekly.
Co-ed housing also showed an associated with other risky behaviors. College students living in co-ed housing were also more likely to have had multiple sexual partners, and to have viewed pornography than students placed in gender-specific housing.
Jason Carroll, a coauthor of the study, said in a press release, “In a time when college administrators and counselors pay a lot of attention to alcohol-related problems on their campuses, this is a call to more fully examine the influence of housing environment on student behavior.”
Lead author Brian Willoughby adds, “Most of the students who live in gender-specific housing did not request to be there; they were placed there by the university. When we first identified these differences with binge drinking, we felt certain that they would be explained by selection effects. But as we examined the data further we found that the differences remained.”
Co-ed housing is becoming the overwhelmingly popular choice among universities. A previous study published by Willoughby and Carroll showed that 90 percent of all university housing is co-ed.
Don’t be shocked if you go to move your daughter into her dorm this summer and her hall is full of young men. In 2010, you only have a 10 percent chance of her having the sweet girls’ dorm you remember from your college days. However, given the priority that is placed on reducing student binge drinking on campus, universities may be called to action by the findings of this study.
