By Benjamin Ogilvie, JD-MBA student at the University of Chicago

Universities used to be some of the best places in America to find a date. Sometimes they still are. At the University of Chicago, where I am a student and famously “where fun goes to die,” most of my peers are interesting, attractive, and bright. They are aristocrats in the best sense of the word: they have traveled widely and read even more widely; they love art and science and philosophy. They want to hone their skills and serve the world. And they are loyal to their families: they care for their family relationships now and want to get married and have children in the future. If you could have coffee with any young person in America, picking a UChicago student wouldn’t be a bad choice.

UChicago is filled with America’s most alluring young adults, and they go on surprisingly few dates. Most of my peers do not care about romance very much: they do not see dating and marriage as aspirational; they focus instead on building careers and having fun. Most UChicago students have career goals and work almost every day to reach them. In contrast, most UChicago students view having a family the same way Kenny Chesney views going to heaven: they want to go there, but they don’t want to go there now. Demographic charts show what this attitude means in practice: a dramatic drop-off in the marriage rate. While over 80% of Americans born in the 1970s or earlier eventually married, only about 65% of Americans born in the 1980s have married, which drops to about 30% of Americans born in the 1990s. The research suggests that those numbers will not increase drastically in the future, which means many younger Americans are never going to get married.

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My classmates’ family attitudes are shaped by their professional expectations. Most of my peers want to have their credentials and starter jobs locked down before getting married and having kids. The most attractive employers—investment banks, law firms, and management consulting firms—have structured their career paths accordingly. During a recruiting event, I heard a high-ranking executive of a major investment bank admit this out loud: he explained that MBA graduates his firm hired were quitting after 3-4 years on the job to have kids, costing the firm a lot of money. His solution was to keep the firm’s entry-level post-MBA “associate” role as intense as ever (somebody has to do the grunt work), but to relax the next promotion up, the “vice president” role. Investment banking associates are expected to be on call virtually 24/7, pull all-nighters on demand, and to work as late as 7PM-12AM most nights; vice presidents also work hard, but have more relaxed hours and are expected to have lives outside of work.

This timeline, where entry-level hires are churned and burned, but employees are expected to have families starting about 3-4 years in, is standard across banking, law, and consulting firms. It reflects an unrealistic timeline for family formation: average UChicago MBA students finish school at age 30, potentially having kids for the first time around age 34. This is assuming everything goes perfectly: some female students nervous about that timeline are now freezing their eggs. Last year, UChicago Booth’s women in business student group brought a feminist egg freezing startup to campus for students exploring this option.

Students who want to date not only have to go against their peers’ priorities, but also against administrators’ expectations. Neither UChicago’s student life office nor its undergraduate student government plan any dances. They used to, but they stopped around 1970 when campus activism overtook dancing as the prime pastime of UChicago undergraduates. The largest undergraduate social events on campus are frat parties and an annual scavenger hunt, which are both fun events but less-than-ideal opportunities to find a date. Other than a few large events, most of UChicago’s social life revolves around identity-based affinity groups: for example, UChicago Law has an LGBT group called OutLaw, a Law Women’s Caucus, a Black Law Students Association, and more. Conservatives get in on the action with religious affinity groups like UChicago’s Christian Legal Society. These groups create much-needed campus community and plan fun events; without them, many of my classmates would be short on friends and things to do. As good as affinity groups are for building community, they do not facilitate dating very much. Helping students settle down seems to be the last thing on university leaders’ minds, as UChicago does not even have married student housing.

On top of that, administrators have used Title IX to restrict casual dating on campus. Asking a classmate out on a whim or attempting to break the touch barrier during a date could count as sexual harassment under UChicago’s baroque Title IX policies. Their omnipresence is impossible to ignore. Posters adorn most campus bulletin boards, instructing students about the many ways to report violations, which include at least two anonymous forms run by different offices, multiple institutional email addresses, and a 24/7 “sexual assault dean on call.” Students who might have gotten their dating scripts from parents or rom-coms are now getting them from droning Title IX training videos, which (at UChicago anyway) teach that hugging someone without explicit permission is a violation of consent in the same way that rape is. Many a date has been prevented by this kind of fearmongering.

The way to stay on the right side of Title IX is to only date through close friends and apps, making those two channels the only fully socially acceptable ways to date in 2025. UChicago students sometimes date their friends: I know of two seriously dating couples in my law school class, and while I would have hoped for more out of my class of 198 people, two is better than zero. Relying on friends for introductions is always a good way to date, but relying on apps is painful. All but the most attractive men generally struggle to find matches on most dating apps, with some becoming frustrated and trolling as a result. Women, for their part, have to deal with said trolling (feeding the Title IX problem), and with dating attractive men who have many options and no incentive to commit: google “West Elm Caleb” for a funny but unsettling example of one such man. Many singles burn out on apps and delete them; this has happened so much in the last few years that the most prominent dating apps are seeing a slump in usage and revenue.

In short, college students are set up to fail at love. Peers, parents, and professors all discourage it, as romance could distract from career success. Students who want love struggle to find each other, exhausting their friend networks and getting burned out by, or getting the ick from, dating apps. Students who do go on dates must deal with not only the normal awkwardness of dating, but the extra awkwardness of dating against the cultural grain, and the supreme awkwardness of potentially violating consent expectations and landing in Title IX purgatory. No wonder many of my classmates attempt to fulfill their social and romantic needs by watching porn or hanging out with same-gender friends instead of dating.

The best way to improve university dating is to completely repeal Title IX’s sexual harassment rules, which do much more to deter dating than keep college kids safe. Unfortunately, those rules are written into federal law and are enforceable by not only federal bureaucrats but also private lawsuits; getting rid of them requires an act of Congress. Republican presidents have tinkered around the edges of Title IX by requiring some due process for accused students, but this is not enough to make the system fair. The Title IX bureaucratic machine is too entrenched to ever be fair. The machine was first put into place by terrorizing universities with rape headlines and lawsuits, so it is built for bureaucratic risk-aversion and not for doing right by students. Students who are raped, assaulted, or stalked should call the police, who have both the authority to punish and the obligation to follow due process for real.

Rather than policing campus romance, it is high time for universities to get involved directly and play matchmaker. Just as most people care more about their families than their careers, most people also care more about the unofficial roles universities play in forming young adults, young families, and American culture than the official roles universities play conducting job training and research. Southern universities have long understood this: their football games and fraternities are legendary. They have friendly vibes and vibrant social scenes, exactly what young adults need to meet potential mates. Three of the five elite schools with the highest long-term marriage rates are nonreligious Southern institutions. Unsurprisingly, Southern universities have seen their enrollment surge over the past few years as many Northeastern universities revealed their not-very-fun sides during COVID-19 and the Palestine protests of 2024.

Southern and red-state universities could build on this success by directly supporting dating and marriage on campus. Young adults are not supposed to navigate dating alone; they need help from older adults, a cultural ritual that has been around as long as human communities have existed. University administrators are ideally suited for the task: they skew middle-aged and female, and they have some life experience and a desire to keep students comfortable and raise retention rates. They excel at giving students free stuff and putting on events: UChicago administrators give out free coffee, donuts, earplugs, snacks, visits with puppies, therapy, condoms, and flu vaccines. Free dating coaches, matchmaking events, and speed-dating parties should be added to the list. The Silicon Valley startup Marriage Pact runs matchmaking events at several prominent universities including Stanford, Notre Dame, and Georgetown; they claim to have over 500,000 participants in their events so far and have successfully set up a few married couples in the process.

For longer than I have been alive, traditionalists have lamented toxic cultural trends spreading from college campuses to the rest of American society. But we are in a family moment, and universities are the best places to rekindle family formation as a key aspiration: they are natural marriage markets and training grounds for America’s elite. Helping college students pair up would help family life flourish for all Americans.

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Where Love Goes to Die