Why College Students Are Having Less Sex

When asked to estimate how many sexual partners their peers had had during the past schoolyear, college students guessed three times the number of partners they'd had. "Even people involved in extreme behavior think their friends are more extreme," says Kathleen Bogle, author of "Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus." The study also found that for male students, the number of sexual partners in the previous year has dropped, from 2.1 in 2000 to 1.6 in 2006. According to a Centers for Disease Control survey, the number of ninth- to 12th-grade students who have had sex dropped almost 10 percent, to fewer than half of respondents, between 1991 and 2005. And a 2001 study found that 39 percent of freshman college women were virgins, and 31 percent of those women still hadn't had sex by senior year. In 2006, nearly half of Harvard undergrads who responded to a survey reported they had never had intercourse.

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