More About College

If you're the parent of a high school senior, and you're still filling out college applications, there's always Oberlin out in Ohio. For $50,000 a year we parents can send our kids to what I'm always told is a wonderful school with an excellent music conservatory. What well-meaning friends and the college counselor don't mention is the added perk for our kids of 'Safer Sex Night' complete with porn movies, a 'Tent of Consent' and alcohol. We parents needn't be alarmed--it's all in the name of sex education.

Oberlin is one of those Mid-Western schools favored by Northeasterners, but in the last five years or so, I keep running into New Yorkers, real dyed-in-the-wool-liberal blue-staters, who don't like the place. Even their teenaged kids don't like the place. One parent described Oberlin as sort of dark with nobody looking very happy. Too much safer sex perhaps.

It's not only Oberlin that goes in for free and generous sex education for the benefit of its students. This article mentions Williams which has a 'Queer Bash' complete with pornography and Vassar which formerly hosted a 'Homo Hop.' Columbia University students report that they have a more sedate Health Fair in the spring. And then there was the XXX-rated porn movie to be shown last spring--with administrative approval--at the University of Maryland, Carnegie Mellon University, Northwestern University and UCLA.

We parents sit like puppies and listen to admissions counselors prattle on about the year abroad and the diversity of the student population, yet we don't bother to ask about the moral climate of the school where our kids will spend--largely unsupervised--four very formative years of their young adult lives.