Attending a college or university is in itself an occupation, so that vicinal proximity is given meaning by the underlying factor of occupational propinquity. Then, too, the relative sameness of their socioeconomic class backgrounds gives college students more interest in common, more likelihood of speaking a "common language," and a greater sharing of common "social definitions of the situation" -- all of which quite obviously facilitate heightened participation and social interaction.
While recognizing that college students tend to come to a large extent from a relatively small stratum of the outside society, we would be blinding ourselves to important factors in mate selection if we were to ignore the existence of stratification on the college and university campus. However narrow in comparison to the breadth of stratification in our outside society the segments from which college and university students are drawn, there nevertheless exists on most campuses a fairly complex class structure, indigenous to the college itself and considered as a little society. 19 This class structure, on the one hand, tends both to reflect and magnify the relatively slight class differences in the larger society from which the students came and, on the other, to be a function of goals, many of them conflicting, peculiar to the campus in question.
There has been much over-simplification of this problem of social stratification in connection with descriptions of courtship patterns on college campuses. It has frequently been assumed that fraternity affiliation and football feats are the principal factors in placing the individual on the college social scale. It is further assumed that this scale has virtually universal recognition on each campus and that those who do not accept its validity consciously and overtly are merely those who rank low on that scale and who are thus manifesting nothing more than a "sour-grapes psychology" when they maintain they do not subscribe to the values such a scale objectifies.
