Today, premarital sex is

Today, premarital sex is more the rule than the exception, but clearly there is no one standard of sexual conduct. Although some students engage in casual sex, a great many are more likely to have a series of relationships that include sex.
When asked to describe the sexual practices of today's college students, a young woman who is a junior at Boston University comments, "I don't think you can say anything is rare or anything is the norm. I haven't seen anything I can say is the norm."
An engineering student describes his social scene:
There's no real dating here. It's either random hookups or a committed relationship. Mostly we just hang out in groups and party together.
And there are some students who strongly believe in abstention, based on religious, family, or personal values. One lively junior, a campus leader, tells of a family ritual:
When we all turned thirteen, my dad gave each of us a chastity ring – and I still wear it. It's a rite of passage thing. It has Christ and the year you turn 13 inscribed on the inside. When I went to college, my parents didn't have to say anything about premarital sex; it was so ingrained in me. Sex is not an issue for me – I'm cool.
According to health service personnel on many campuses, students know less about sex and birth control than most adults think they do. In spite of generally available sex education courses, students remain surprisingly ignorant about the relative safety and risks of various protective methods. At one university, an RA in an all-freshmen dorm called a member of the counseling staff the second week of school, requesting a workshop on sexuality immediately, because her residents were "bed-hopping" with what seemed to be little regard for the consequences of their behavior.
The whole subject of sexual practices among young people changed when the threat of AIDS reached the ivory tower. College administrators and students debate the format of educational campaigns – Should we dispense condoms? Should we educate about "safe sex" or should we address abstention the only responsible solution to this frightening problem? Ethical, moral, and legal questions relating to university policy have brought into the public domain questions usually reserved for private and intimate relationships. And students respond with varying degrees of anxiety. Some heterosexual students toss AIDS off as a problem for gay students, wearing the cloak of invincibility typical of their age and denying the reality of the threat to the heterosexual community. Others have made significant changes in their sexual behavior and are reevaluating this whole arena of their lives.
As a result of the widespread media coverage, students have become increasingly aware of the dangers of other sexually transmitted diseases, such as chlamydia, herpes, and genital warts, and these STDs are treated with regularity in college and university health services. Many students and parents are unaware that hepatitis B is a serious STD that can be prevented by a vaccination.
"Safe sex" no longer alludes simply to protection from pregnancy, but protection from disease and even death. It is difficult to assess how much influence these developments have had on the intimate relationships and bedroom behavior of college students. However, "caution," "abstention," and "monogamy" are part of the sexual idiom of many of today's students.