Research shows many college students arrive without the sex education they need to understand consent, build healthy relationships and prevent sexual violence.

It’s back-to-school season, and besides exams, essays and job applications, college students have another threat to worry about: sexual assault. As many U.S. universities start their fall semesters, we’re heading into the “Red Zone”—the high-risk period on college campuses from now through Thanksgiving break, when over 50 percent of all campus sexual assaults occur.

But many students arrive on campus without having received the sex education that could help prepare them to navigate consent, communication and sexual relationships. A recent survey from college sexual assault prevention nonprofit It’s On Us found that more than two-thirds of men now in college never received formal sex education in high school.

Millions of U.S. high schoolers lack comprehensive, inclusive sex education—or receive no sex education at all—leaving too many without meaningful instruction on consent and communication before they enter college. Today, 36 states and the District of Columbia require schools to teach sex ed. But not all require curricula to cover basics such as consent and contraception, and some do not even mandate that sex education taught in schools be medically accurate.

And instead of closing those gaps, the Trump administration is making them worse. Its attacks on public school sex ed include cutting millions of dollars in funding for community sex education and teen pregnancy prevention programs, while encouraging organizations to rewrite their sex ed programs to promote pregnancy and parenthood (though just this week, a federal judge halted Trump’s conservative overhaul to the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program).

As the It’s On Us research suggests, what students learn—or don’t learn—before college matters. As a new school year begins, students need quality sex education that gives them the tools to understand consent, communicate boundaries and recognize and prevent sexual violence.

Insufficient Sex Ed and Sexual Violence: A Hidden Link

Originally an initiative of the Obama administration, It’s On Us runs workshops for college athletes focusing on sexual assault and domestic violence prevention. Over the last several years, It’s On Us staff noticed huge disparities between how much previous knowledge and preparation individual students had, prior to the workshops. 

… The current state of sex education is failing young men … [and] driving very serious issues of sexual violence on campus.

Tracey Vitchers, executive director of It’s On Us

Three separate research projects with It’s On Us students revealed this gap was the result of wildly different sex ed experiences across different states and public, private and religious schools.

“One of the continued threads through each of those research studies was this acknowledgement among the young men that they did not feel prepared for engaging in [sexual violence] prevention education when they got to college because they had such varied and inconsistent sexual health education and relationship and violence prevention education,” Tracey Vitchers, executive director of It’s On Us, told Ms.

It’s On Us’ newest research project, “The Preparation Problem,” focuses on K-12 sex education—specifically how sex ed shapes college men’s beliefs, behaviors and preparation to engage in sexual violence prevention efforts. 

“What we ultimately found is that the current state of sex education is failing young men,” Vitchers says, “and that is manifesting directly in how they engage with, receive and then actualize the prevention education that they participate in on campus, and is likely driving these very serious issues of sexual violence on campus.”

Even though most colleges and universities require some form of sexual assault prevention training, usually part of freshmen orientation week, the numbers suggest this kind of programming is often ineffective.

13 percent of U.S. college students experience rape or sexual assault.

That number doubles for women, with 26.4 percent of college women (and 6.8 percent of college men) experiencing sexual violence as undergraduates.

With its “The Preparation Problem” campaign, It’s On Us hopes to shed light on the link between insufficient sex ed in K-12 school and college students’ lack of preparedness to prevent sexual violence on campus.

Even though federal laws such as the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination (SaVE) Act require all institutions of higher education to put students through sexual violence prevention programming, with high school sex ed so radically different from state to state, many students are receiving an incomplete patchwork of education about sex and healthy relationships.

“Institutions have this tendency to put them through this very cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all prevention programming that doesn’t interrogate what kind of prevention education they may have had,” Vitchers says. “These varied state education policies are having a direct negative impact on the ability of colleges to effectively implement prevention programming on campus.”

“The Preparation Problem” makes an important distinction between the formal and informal education about sex that young men receive prior to college. One of the main findings is many college men learned about sex through media (movies, TV, social media, etc.) before the age of 12—meaning that formal sex education in K-12 should ideally start even younger than it usually does.

The problem with getting sex ed primarily through media, Vitchers explained, is that it frequently lacks context or inclusive, evidence-based information. “We know that much of that content that is being directed at young men on social media around these topics is coming from manosphere influencers who promote really harmful ideas about gender norms and consent,” she says.

It’s On Us also found early exposure to content that reinforced rigid gender norms or encouraged feelings of hostility toward women continued to shape young men even if they were later exposed to more comprehensive, sex positive or feminist sex ed experiences.

Rather than shifting to more inclusive views, young men with these prior experiences of misogynistic messaging were more likely to double down on their hostility toward women when later encountering sex ed in a more formal setting—suggesting that colleges and universities can’t just assume surface-level sex ed videos in freshman orientation week (“Don’t rape,” “Don’t hit your girlfriend,” etc.) will be enough to change more deeply entrenched attitudes and behaviors.

“What schools need to be doing is having a better understanding of the messages and education these young men have had, then creating prevention programming that meets them where they’re at,” Vitchers said.

Searching for Solutions

It’s On Us encourages colleges and universities to present sex ed programming with the understanding that students are coming from an extremely wide range of prior sex ed experiences—including no sex ed at all, abstinence-focused sex ed or even slightly more comprehensive education that is still not evidence-based or medically accurate.

College-level sex ed also needs to link basic education around consent more explicitly to sexual violence prevention strategies. According to Vitchers, it’s also crucial that students learn this content in a way that they can apply directly to their own lives. 

Required videos are easy to fast-forward through and don’t give students a chance to interact. 

Bringing in a speaker or someone from an outside agency is a notch better, but outside trainings aren’t always culturally relevant to a specific school’s student body and can fall into the trap of blaming and shaming students for not being better informed.

It’s On Us is hoping to do a second study, building on “The Preparation Problem’s” findings, to find even more effective solutions for sexual violence prevention programming that truly resonates with students.

It’s also crucial that any sex ed or sexual assault prevention program is inclusive of LGBTQ+ students and other marginalized identities. For “The Preparation Problem,” It’s On Us intentionally oversampled LGBTQ+ and Black men in their survey of more than 1,000 college-aged men to get a better sense of how these specific identities, frequently disadvantaged in formal educational settings, contributed to young men’s prior experiences with sex education.

It’s On Us found the Black and LGBTQ+ men in their sample entered college with more comprehensive understandings of sex, consent and relationships than their white and straight peers and stronger values surrounding sexual violence prevention and building healthy relationships.

“With LGBTQ+ men, we found that when they turned to online sources for education on sexual health education, violence prevention, etc., they were more likely to seek out medically accurate sources [such as Planned Parenthood or the Cleveland Clinic],” Vitchers says. “We know the state of sex ed is not great, even for heterosexual students, and it’s even worse for LGBTQ+ students, and so queer men may be turning to online sources and looking for more medically accurate information because they didn’t receive that in school.”

Black men in the research study “did have healthier attitudes towards consent, violence prevention and sexual communication,” Vitchers says. “Largely we found that that was due to conversations with friends and family, and that the Black community is more likely to be doing this education within a community setting [because of] the ways that false sexual violence allegations have been weaponized against Black men for centuries in this country. 

“Part of our assumption here is that the family members want to protect their young Black men from harmful allegations, and so are more likely to have conversations with them at younger ages about the importance of consent, healthy sexual communication and violence prevention, and then that is showing up when they come to campus.”

The data from “The Preparation Problem” shows giving young men intentional, comprehensive sex education at a young age has a massive payoff when it comes to sexual violence prevention awareness and preparedness in college.

However, recent legislation, especially in more conservative states, has required K-12 sex ed to double down on abstinence-only or more fear-based messaging. Laws from the last few years, such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, have also gutted any attempts to be more inclusive of LGBTQ+ students or students of color. The rise of the manosphere and the ever-growing list of men in Congress accused of sexual assault all contribute to normalizing gender-based violence.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has weaponized federal laws such as Title IX to target trans youth under the guise of protecting young women and girls from sexual violence. At the same time, the administration is promoting extremely rigid theories about gender and laws pushing abstinence-centered, anti-DEI bills for sex ed in schools.

According to Vitchers, the long-term effect of these bills will be “a generation of young people who are unprepared to navigate sex consent and relationships in a healthy way.”

However, even with eroding sex ed in K-12 schools, colleges and universities still offer an opportunity to educate young people about sex, consent and violence prevention. It’s On Us and other programs are working to create more comprehensive programming that colleges can implement. Meanwhile, research such as “The Preparation Problem” strongly suggests it is possible to bridge this gap between insufficient high school sex ed and the adult world with intentional, comprehensive messaging.

“In the current climate, it is unlikely that we will see legislative reform on these issues at state or federal level,” Vitchers says. “I think it’s really important that we are not just equipping young people with media literacy to be able to differentiate between evidence-based, medically accurate sex education and prevention work, but also we need to be equipping parents and community leaders to have these conversations and to know what are medically accurate resources.”

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A note from Ms. editors: We want to hear from you for The Majority, a new campaign collecting stories about how reproductive freedom has enabled readers to build the lives they want and need. Poll after poll shows a majority of Americans support reproductive healthcare access. Yet public debate overlooks the lives shaped by abortion access, contraception, IVF, miscarriage care, maternal healthcare or comprehensive sex education—countless women who chose to pursue an education, have children, not have children, protect their health and chart their own future. Add your voice and complete the sentence: “Access to reproductive choices gave me the freedom to….” Together, these stories will help show not only why reproductive freedom remains a majority value, but also what it makes possible. 

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