The 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair Poll: Alma Matters

If we could do college all over again, most Americans would choose studying over sex. And we know exactly what we’d be eating while doing it.

To answer the questions yourself, visit the 60 Minutes homepage at

‘Bright college days,” sang Tom Lehrer long ago, “carefree days that fly.” Do they ever. And how easily we forget them.

Most of us probably take a more generous view of the S.A.T.’s than we did in our school days. A majority of Americans consider them either a “necessary evil” or a “successful equalizer”; only a third of us regard them as a waste of time or a “failed ideal.” And a whopping 86 percent don’t care—one way or the other—if someone we know was a member of a fraternity or a sorority; as undergrads, most of us almost certainly cared—one way or the other—a great deal.

It gets worse: two-thirds of us don’t know what state Northwestern University is in. And it certainly gets worse for those in the fund-raising game: most college grads can’t name the current president or dean of their alma mater, although, presumably, they can name their alma mater. Finally, more Americans object to their college-age kids making fake IDs than to those same kids keeping farm animals in their dorm rooms. Even more interesting: Republicans object less to that agrarian housing situation. Clearly the enlightened party, at least as regards dorm rooms (though perhaps we should have asked about cohabitating with farm animals of the opposite sex).

From left, by Juanito Aguil, Peter Michael Dills, Justin Sullivan, Kimihiro Hoshino/AFP, all from Getty Images; © DIZ Muenchen GmbH, Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy; by Kevin Mazur/WireImage; from Interim Archives/Getty Images.