Trojan Brand Condoms ranked Syracuse University as one of the top 10 best colleges for sexual health this year.

Syracuse is ranked ninth, up from 16th last year and 25th in 2012. In 2009, Trojan Brand Condoms ranked SU 76th in its fourth annual Sexual Health Report Card, down from 19th the previous year.

Clare Keaney, the president of Students Advocating Sexual Safety and Empowerment at SU, said the difference between SU and other campuses is clear.

“The difference between the SU campus and others’ openness to safe sexual activity is the amount of groups on campus that advocate for safe and consensual sex,” she said.

Keaney said SASSE is just one of many organizations on campus that do such work, naming Pride Union, A Men’s Issue and Sex Symbols as other examples.

“These groups create safe spaces to discuss the consequences of un-safe and non-consensual sex and work to include all students in this important discussion,” she said.

Bert Sperling, founder of Sperling’s BestPlaces, the firm that conducted Trojan’s study, said the reason for the initial drop was student feedback.

The study, released last week, was conducted based on 10 factors, Sperling said. The factors included availability of the health center, information and cost of contraceptives, availability of HIV and STD testing, lectures, outreach, student organizations, general safety information, availability of sexual assault information, website functionality and what Sperling called “extra credit points.”

To illustrate an example of extra credit points, he described an app the University of Oregon has in place that helps students with information and resources when it comes to sexual contact, whether consensual or not.

Sperling said SU’s recent rise in the rankings is attributed to continued success in many of the aforementioned areas. Sperling specifically noted excellence in contraceptive availability, HIV and STD testing, outreach programs and web helpfulness. He also emphasized that the website is a crucial component of the study and an important resource for students.

Trojan paired up with Sperling’s BestPlaces to conduct the study. Sperling said the directive was to design something to measure student health in general. He believes the study, in its ninth year, is definitely achieving its objectives, primarily in the sense that it has raised the level of awareness.

Oregon State University was rated the best school in the country for sexual health. The University of Texas at Austin, University of Maryland-College Park, University of Arizona and Stanford University rounded out the top five. The University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Brown University and Columbia University in the City of New York also placed ahead of SU. In total, 140 schools are ranked and Brigham Young University was ranked 140th.

For SU and other schools across the country, Sperling said the research helps both the students and the school. It provides students with access to information so that they can approach the administration with ideas and solutions for improving, he said. It also gives student health centers a “benchmark,” as he described it, to meet and exceed.

Sperling said he enjoys releasing the study and said it’s “very heartening to provide this information to students.”

The research is getting much more difficult, though, because as Sperling explains, schools are becoming so excellent in focusing on student health issues that the quality of services and information available is improving each year.

Keaney said that being ranked in the top 10 “is not only validating, but inspiring.”

The ranking is encouraging SASSE, Keaney said, and they are committed to improving even more until “Syracuse University (is) the most sexually-safe campus in the U.S.”

Published on October 27, 2014 at 12:01 am

Contact Danny: dmantoot@syr.edu