This week, for the second time in the nearly 400-year history of Harvard University, students will be celebrating sex week on campus. The event, first held this spring, features lectures and workshops about sex and culture—and is a step toward creating a sex-positive college campus. The student-created week also promotes safe sex, which is more important than ever, with 25 percent of college students estimated to have STDs, as well as continuing instances of sexual violence on campuses.
Harvard’s not the only Ivy League school making strides in sexual health. Among the top schools in Sperling’s 2012 Sexual Health Report Card, four of the top 10 schools are in the Ivy League. For the second year in a row, Sperling’s Best Places and Trojan provided The Daily Beast with an exclusive preview of the data for its ranking of student sexual-health services at colleges across the nation. This marks the seventh year for the list, which remains the most comprehensive evaluation of campus sexual-health services.
To compile its ranking, Sperling’s reached out to the student-health centers and administrators at 141 of the nation’s largest and most iconic undergraduate institutions and asked them to evaluate their programs based on a dozen measures of convenience, scope, and quality—including the availability of condoms and contraceptives, testing for HIV and STDs, health center hours, and sexual-assault services—rating each on a scale from one to 10.
