Co-ed college housing linked to more sex, drinking

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Students in co-ed college accommodation are more likely to binge drink and have more sex, according to a US study that may confirm parents' worries.

A survey of more than 500 students at five US universities found that students living in co-ed housing were 2.5 times more likely than those in all-male or all-female dorms to admit to binge-drinking on a weekly basis.

They were also more than twice as likely to say they'd had at least three sex partners in the past year.

The findings, published in the Journal of American College Health, may not surprise many college students.

"A lot of the reaction we've been getting from students is, 'Well, we've known that,'" said researcher Brian Willoughby, who conducted the study while at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul and is now a visiting professor at Brigham Young University in Salt Lake City.

Willoughby told Reuters Health that the findings should make more universities, researchers and parents aware of the issue.

He said 90% of university housing in the United States is now co-ed -- part of a larger move away from the traditional notion that colleges should act as stand-ins for parents and enforce rules on students' social behavior.

"This transition to co-ed housing has happened without an evaluation of its effects," Willoughby said.

In the study, Willoughby and colleague Jason Carroll found that more than 41% of students in co-ed housing said they binged on a weekly basis compared to less than 18% of those in single-sex dorms.

While 63% of students in single-sex housing said they'd had no sexual partners in the past year, this was true of only 44% of students in co-ed dorms. Among students in co-ed housing, almost 13% said they had had three or more sexual partners in the past year, compared with 5% of students in single-sex dorms.

Willoughby said the findings did not appear to be a matter of "selection" -- that is, kids who are more prone to drinking and sex being more likely to request co-ed housing.

Few college students specifically ask for single-sex housing, the researcher noted, and most that end up in those dorms were simply placed there by their universities.

Willoughby and Carroll also surveyed the students on religion and personality traits such as impulsivity and extroversion, and found that those factors did not explain away the connection between co-ed housing and drinking and sex.

Willoughby speculated that co-ed dorms may implicitly set different "social norms" than single-sex housing does. Students, he explained, may expect co-ed dorms to have higher rates of drinking and sex, which may make them more likely to live up to those expectations.

"It's not necessarily simply about women and men living together," Willoughby said.