I’ll be honest: Where someone went to school isn’t the first thing I usually want to know when meeting people for the first time. But for those of you whom that is a conversation starter, good news — we now have a list of which colleges produce the most dateable alumni, courtesy of chi-chi online matchmaking service the Dating Ring. Where does your school fall on the list? And perhaps more importantly, does it even matter?
According to the Daily Mail, the Dating Ring surveyed 1,600 of its users between March 2013 and September 2014, collecting a total of 7,500 date feedback reports. Then they tallied up how many people said they’d go on a second date to one of their matches and cross-referenced results with each member’s alma mater (about 361 schools in total). Based on this information, they compiled a list of the top 10 and bottom 10 schools for dateable alumni — so prepare to feel either really awesome about yourself or really terrible. The 10 schools that apparently produce the best dates are:
- Colgate University
- Lehigh University
- University of Texas – Austin
- University of Southern California
- McGill University
- University of Delaware
- San Francisco State University
- Boston University
- Northwestern University
- Williams College
Congratulations, schools! You win!
And the 10 schools who produce the worst dates are:
- Babson College
- University of Chicago
- Rutgers University
- University of Washington
- Michigan State University
- Binghamton University
- University of California – Berkeley
- University of Pennsylvania
- Princeton University
- University of California – Santa Barbara
Sorry, schools. Better luck next time.
The study isn’t without its flaws, however; we don’t, for example, know exactly what it was about the dates from these schools that made them more or less fun. The ones who landed on the Least Dateable Alumni list don’t seem entirely surprised — said Babson graduate Sarah Sukumaran to the Mail: “Post-grad, I think a lot of us do struggle to date, because we’re so focused on our careers. We spend…8 a.m. to 8 p.m. at our jobs and by the time the day is done, we don’t want to go out” — but their reasoning is pretty much all conjecture.
Furthermore, as EJ Dickson at The Daily Dot points out, the results from this survey are almost certainly a little skewed. The Dating Ring’s services are only available in New York and San Francisco at the moment — and indeed, a whopping 81 percent of the participants live in New York, while the other 19 live in San Francisco. As a result, the question is less “which colleges produce the most dateable alumni?” and more “which colleges produce the most dateable alumni who also happen to be attracted to two very specific cities in the United States?” Dickson goes on to note that the study results might even say more about the kinds of people who use the Dating Ring than they do about the colleges they attended: “Maybe the Dating Ring has an unusually high percentage of attractive, professional Colgate alumni, for instance, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect on the attractiveness of the Colgate student body itself.” True that.
I do think, though, that there is one very solid thing we can take away from this study: No one should be listening to the Princeton Mom’s dating advice. Or her life advice. Or any advice from her, really.
Images: malloreigh/Flickr; Giphy (2)
