Would you like a SchoolDate? ⋆ College Magazine

The days of serendipitously meeting sultry strangers at bars and clubs are soon ending. Instead, college students are seeking companionship on their LCD screens with the help of a “.edu” e-mail address and a steamy profile picture.

As students currently enrolled in college, we are members of Generation Y, also known as the “Dot-com Generation.” It comes as no surprise then that our familiarity with the web is manifesting itself in our dating lives as well.

In November 2010, Co-founders Balazs Alexa and Jean Myer launched DateMySchool.com exclusively for students of Columbia University. A month later, the two shrewd Columbia business students branched out to include students from New York University as well. Their expansion didn’t stop there—to this day, DMS members can browse student profiles from students of more than 300 universities.

The key to their success is their exclusivity and the fact that students are generally extremely ambitious. Since every member must have a “.edu” e-mail address, users may feel safe under the assumption that everyone on the site is, or has been, a college student at their mentioned university. Privacy measures are huge selling points for DateMySchool.com because members technically can’t be found on the site unless they want to be. Members’ profiles cannot be accessed through Google or any other search engine and only individuals who fit each member’s desired criteria can view their profile. For example, if a student selected his preferences to be “Athletic male, NYU, College of Arts & Sciences, between 18 and 24,” only individuals who meet these criteria can view that student’s profile… Pretty great, right?

That’s what the creators of SchoolDate.com believe, anyway. This new site is launching on Monday, September 26^th, and follows the same formula as DateMySchool.com: privacy and efficiency. The creators of SchoolDate.com have leaped onto the college online dating wagon and who knows how many will hop onboard next.

With ambition comes sacrifice, and for our generation, that means shelving the slow, “normal” process of dating and turning to the web, which offers a speedy, “no nonsense” alternative to meeting people. Let’s face it: online college dating is here and it’s here to stay.