Campus competition and co-ed allure: An institution-level analysis of collegiate dating markets

The current study examines the political economy of collegiate dating markets by employing institution-level data from the national colleges and universities included in U.S. News & World Report's Best Colleges 2012. This is a more comprehensive sample than has been used in previous studies and includes 250 colleges and universities across all regions of the United States. We also make use of female student attractiveness ratings from collegeprowler.com to assess the relationship between the extent of competition among for dates, as captured in the percentage of the student body accounted for by females, and the attractiveness of the female students involved in that competition. Results from OLS, two-stage least squares, ordered probit and simultaneous probit models all converge on the outcome wherein female student attractiveness increases as dating competition becomes more intense. Two of these models also suggest that the percent of a college's student body accounted for by female students does not depend on attractiveness.