Sexy health Princeton style
Apparently our campus has become a lot more sexually healthy over the past year. The Trojan Sexual Health Report Card, created by Trojan® condoms, Sperling's BestPlaces and Rock the Vote, is an annual ranking of sexual health at American colleges and universities. Last year Princeton ranked 61st. This year we rocketed up to 8th.So what makes a school sexually healthy? A recent Prince column suggested that there is sexual harassment on the Street. And fellow New Jersey school Rutgers is ranked as the 9th most sexually healthy university -- but a gay Rutgers student recently committed suicide after his roommate streamed a video of him having sex. It appears that sexual harassment and homophobia are not considered in the rankings. What is?Sperling's BestPlaces assigned each college or university a GPA based on scoring from 12 categories. See the categories after the jump:
- Health center hours of operation
- Availability of patient drop-in vs. appointment only
- Availability of separate sexual awareness program
- Contraceptive availability and cost
- Condom availability and cost
- HIV testing, cost and locality (on- vs. off-campus)
- Other STI testing, cost and locality (on- vs. off-campus)
- Availability of anonymous advice via email / newspaper column
- Existence of lecture / outreach programs
- Existence of student peer groups
- Availability of sexual assault programs
- Website usability and functionality
It appears that free condoms from RCAs and SHARE did the trick for the Tigers. Columbia outdid us, however, ranking number 1 because of the school's new "Ask Alice" program, through which students can ask sexual health questions annonymously online. Several Midwestern state schools also beat us, with Michigan State University, Ohio State University and University of Michigan-Ann Arbor ranking 2nd, 3rd and 4th respectively. But we did top Harvard, which came in at 16th.