Less Bach, more Bacchanalia on College Campuses, Please

Tina Brown's Daily Beast has provided this important service to parents with college-bound kids: It has ranked the Top 25 colleges by the horniness and the beauty of the student body.

Beauty is easy enough to measure and important too, afterall, because "who wants to spend four years in Uglyville." But how does this probing investigation measure horniness?

One metric is whether the schools land on Playboy's best party school list.  That's fair enough. But then the fashion diva suddenly loses her moxie and turns charmingly old fashioned (or lazy). She doesn't actually try and nail how much sex kids are having with each other, with themselves, or other campus creatures. Or employ any other direct metric of sexual activity like condom sales or clap outbreaks. Rather, she relies on proxies such as whether or not the male-and-female ratio is evenly balanced. Campuses where it is get more points than those where it isn't. Why? Because that evidently ensures that both genders have a "fair shot at a hookup." Obviously, the Daily Beast staff has missed Lady GaGa's polyamorous revolution. Nor has it read I am Charlotte Simons, Tom Wolfe's execrable account of how girls go to college to meet their inner nymphomaniac not their soul mates.

But the interesting thing about the two rankings is just how little overlap there is between the two lists. Only five colleges make it to both lists, which tells us what? Beautiful people don't have a lot of sex? Or ugly people do?

So, parents, here is the $200,000 question for you: What do you want your kids to have in their campus experience? Quality or quantity?

Of the five schools on both lists, the school with the best-combined score—14— is actually University of Wisconsin, Madison, a public school. This means that Wisconsin parents can look forward to paying in-state tuition rates to provide four years of a genuinely balanced and cost-effective sex life for their kids.

On Wisconsin!