Campus Connection

Onl

ine dating sites are often regarded as the kind of things that mature adults use to recapture the wider-ranging romantic opportunities of their younger days. But now there are a growing number of sites that let college students connect up by logging on.

Two years ago, Dan Stillman and Matt Eaton, then sophomores at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, launched WesMatch.com, a site featuring a humorous, elaborate personality questionnaire. The service allows students to rate themselves and their potential mates in categories ranging from sex drive to "socialisticbutterflyosity." An algorithm then calculates a student's compatibility with a list of matches. "I wanted a vegan girlfriend who plays the cello and likes folk music," Stillman says. The site has been a hit on the Wesleyan campus. This fall their more ambitious project, CampusMatch, may expand from five to dozens of schools.

The Wesleyan pioneers are not alone. Students from Berkeley to Brown now have access to online college dating services. One might think that with keg parties and road trips and coed dorms, college dating would not require online assistance. But to a generation of people brought up surfing the Net, it seems natural that they would find dates the same way that they buy books or keep journals. Dave Kloster, one of a group of M.I.T. students who last month launched the Matchup, a Boston-based dating site, says, "The more intense the school," the more receptive students have been to his service.

With college dating sites, which are closed to noncollegians, users are more likely to be matched with people who are in their age range and who share their educational background and social reference points. As a result, college sites are much more intimate than regular sites, with users posting their cell-phone numbers and home addresses.

The operators of college dating sites sometimes don't like to admit their sites are for dating, preferring to play up how they enhance student life in general. Chris Hughes, a rising junior at Harvard who helped start Thefacebook.com at his school earlier this year, says when his roommate Mark Zuckerberg came up with the idea, it was to be "a directory of information for college students." Offering Friendsteresque features, it allows students to network through friends and connect with people in their classes they would like to meet. The site now boasts 58 member colleges, including all of the Ivy League.