OKCupid: Penn Students Have Low Sex Drive

Penn students were ranked as having the third lowest sex drive of the top 20 U.S. colleges.

OKCupid has a lot of users, and a treasure trove of data about them. Every once in a while, they release data in a cutesy way, and we get to laugh at the non-scientific correlations made from the data. It’s fun! In many ways it’s much more fun than dating.

The latest release from OKC is an analysis of the habits of the top 20 colleges in the country (at least according to U.S. News and World Report).

And we learned one very important fact from about the University of Pennsylvania: Its students have low sex drives. At the very least, Penn kids say they have less sex than members of other elite colleges, universities and Princeton.

So are Penn kids just too focused on finance to hook up? Is there something in the water in West Philly? Can I use this as an excuse for an extraordinary dry spell my junior year of college at Penn? (I know the answer to that last one!)

OKCupid listed 20 schools, using data from people between the ages of 18 and 24 with @[school].edu email addresses. Penn ranked 10th in attractiveness and 6th in partying (and, uh, 9th in the U.S. News rankings). The grade level of Penn students’ messages ranked 18th, but they were 2nd-most likely to get replies.

“Our sex drive index combines data retrieved from OkCupid questions within the subject matter of sexual activity,” the site says about its methodology. “Higher ranks mean more sexual desire and claimed activity.” Penn students may have been just demure in their responses. (From my experience when I was on OkCupid, there are a lot of strange questions.) Only students at Dartmouth and Notre Dame (duh) had lower sex drives than Penn kids.

It’s odd Penn has such a high ranking for partying and such a low one for sex drive. Do Penn students party too much to have sex afterward? What would notorious braggart Benjamin Franklin think of this demureness? Will the New York Times have to do another Penn sorority girl exposé in light of this new data? Good research always leads to more questions.

[via The DP]