I need to reassess my nephew, Ben. He’s a good son to my sister, a functional nephew to Uncle Larry, a successful computer-technology-engineering magician for a major international industrial firm.
But, I’ve never found him fascinating in the way that I find, say, myself, fascinating. But, as I say, it may be time to reassess.
You see, Ben went to Yale, which according to a recent issue of Newsweek magazine, is the happiest and second-horniest institution of higher learning in the United States.
This is not to say that Ben is necessarily happy to the point of ecstasy, or unduly predatory in a sexual kind of way. Needless to say, I’d like him to fill out a questionnaire so that I have sense of what is in store for the family, as a happy, horny young man matures into … what, exactly?
The “happy” quotient, according to Newsweek, was based on nightlife, dining, housing, weather, and how deep in debt you sank in order to attend Yale. The nightlife and dining is fine in New Haven; the Yale housing can be quite nice; and apart from my sister and her husband having to move to a hut in the jungle after the Yale tuition bills came due, all seems well on that front. No wonder Ben seems so happy.
To finish a close second in the nation on the “horny” scale (first place went to Wesleyan University (also in Connecticut, an apparent national headquarters for horniness), Yale had to register high marks for student looks and not much in the way of what the magazine called “campus strictness.”
Ben and I certainly share the family genes for shocking good looks. And I do remember a story a few years back in which a Yale couple making love in a university shower plugged the drain and caused a bit of a flood. They were scolded for the water damage, not the, well, you know.
The point of this particular column, focused as it is on sex and happiness, is to boost the circulation of the Hartford Business Journal — as I have been ordered to do. If I wrote about commercial real estate, the readers would become morose and probably wouldn’t have sex for six months and would cancel their subscriptions.
That being said, there is a business lesson in all this — or, at least, a business question. If you were Yale, or Wesleyan (now that the Methodist clergy have been banished from the place, for lack of horniness), how would you market your success in the Newsweek poll?
Happy and horny might work well as an advertising theme for an assisted living facility, but Yale and Wesleyan reek of snobby sophistication and quality education. In the same Newsweek survey, Yale ranked first in the “Brainiac” category for mass-producing distinguished alumni.
The answer is market segmentation. The happy-horny message will work just fine for many of the kids; for the parents, best “Return on Investment” (Princeton and Amherst) or “Cheapest” (small tuition, generous financial aid) is good for the universities of Wyoming, Idaho and New Mexico. For the high school guidance counselors, play to the academic strengths, as identified by Newsweek. Harvard and Yale snare the computer geeks; New York City and Boston snare the theater/art/music types with Emerson College, Berklee College of Music and New York University.
Maybe I could get a lucrative gig doing a celebrity ad for Yale or Wesleyan. “Come here to school and be (pause) wink, wink, HAPPY, if you get the drift.”
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.