Skinny Sweepstakes

In the push for achievement, the perfect body is now part of the perfect resume. Deprived of an internal compass, girls compete to be "hottest," turning colleges into incubators of eating disorders.

By Hara Estroff Marano, published on January 01, 2008 - last reviewed on June 11, 2009

That body competition is worse among students at all-girls schools makes perfect sense to Geoffrey Miller. The psyche reads the environment as a scarcity of males. And that only ups the mate competition among females. "It's a supply-and-demand effect," he suggests. Candice Sombrero would agree. A transfer student, she finds that eating disorders are much less prevalent at Babson than at most other schools. "This is a business college, and the ratio of males to females is 60:40 or 70:30."

If it is indeed a supply-and-demand effect, then America's campuses ought to be bracing for a near epidemic of eating disorders. The ratio of males to females is shrinking dramatically at most colleges; even Babson, able to draw from a larger pool of women, aims to add more female students.

It is a particularly cruel irony that, through unforeseen shifts in gender balance, higher education as it's now constituted winds up lowering the threshold for one of the most mentally and physically disabling disorders of our time.—Hara Estroff Marano

Pressure Control

Just as there is no single cause of eating disorders among the young—they are rooted in conditions set long before college—there is no one solution. But many contributing elements can be addressed by schools, parents, and the culture at large.

Attenuate the competitive pressure on kids; dispute the idea that the only path to success runs through Harvard Yard.
Combat the pursuit of perfection: Discuss the impossibility of being perfect, the self-preoccupation that dogs perfectionists, and perfectionism's ultimately self-defeating nature.
Allow the young meaningful engagement in a broad range of experiences beyond their usual routines.
Encourage kids to experiment by giving them permission to fail, so they can claim their own experience and construct a strong sense of self.
Discard helicopter parenting for real parenting, because authentic connection inoculates kids against the excesses of peer culture.
Expose kids to alternatives to the pseudo culture mass manufactured for their consumption.
Lobby upper schools to dampen the college-entrance sweepstakes. This in turn could force colleges to revamp admissions policies predicated on excess selectivity favoring ultracompetitive overachievers.