Why Your Dating Life Won't Ever Be As Exciting As It Was in College
Mating follows assortative patterns. Tens marry tens. Nines marry nines, all the way down to the ones and twos. And this is equally true of rankings of intelligence as it is of looks. Highly intelligent people tend to marry highly intelligent people (indeed, this trend has strengthened recently). Dim-wits tend to marry dim-wits.
Focusing on just the issue of intelligence, we can already see why college might prove an unusually good place to find a mate. After all, the SAT correlates as well with IQ tests as it does with an SAT given at another date. It is, effectively, an IQ test. So colleges already bring together people of a similar IQ range by using the SAT (as well as earlier academic performance) in their entrance criteria.
But the assorting continues beyond this, for college also groups people according to common interests (the classes they take and campus clubs), intelligence subtypes (English majors and engineers tend to have different subscore patterns on IQ tests, and this is true of all professions), and even what sort of work you later want to do. Indeed, some schools are even assorted by geographical region (think state schools) and all select for students who are attracted to that particular institution's ways of doing things.
If a major part of dating is carrying out the assortment process, half of your work is already done for you if you date within the confines of the university.
Furthermore, college is a period in life where financial status does not as seriously contribute to the process of dating as it does in later life. You are more likely to find a girl whose attraction is actually to you---and not intermixed with an attraction to your status---which can only be beneficial if your purpose is actual companionship. In the college environment, women are deprived of the pecuniary data they put to such effect in later life: and they may actually give you a chance.
There is, however, a dark side to all this. A girl who might have fallen head over heals for you if you were the one man in her circle who could intelligently discuss literature and was not an ardent homosexual might not choose you if she has hundreds of men who have read "Pale Fire" at her disposal. This, of course, means that being dumped for another is a greater risk in the university environment than it would be in just about any other: The pre-assorting done by the university also stiffens the competition.
Universities are, for better or worse, erotic powder kegs. The phenomenon of assortative mating guarantees it.