Opinion | Girls should be seeking an education, not a husband, at university

Hey girls - study hard. Go to Princeton and find your husband! That's the advice Princeton alumna and mother Susan Patton had for Princeton women when she wrote a controversial letter to The Daily Princetonian.

"As Princeton women, we have almost priced ourselves out of the market," she wrote. "Simply put, there is a very limited population of men who are as smart or smarter than we are. And I say again - you will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you."

Surprisingly, many Hong Kong mothers completely agree with Patton. One very talented girl, now studying at Harvard, told me her mother always said that her brother should go there because it's a great university and that she should go there because she'll be able to find a suitable husband.

What's driving all this advice is the fear that girls will become "leftover" women or shengnu, if they don't hurry up and find a spouse. Here in Hong Kong, the number of unmarried women between the ages of 30 and 39 had increased from 164,000 in 2001 to over 187,000 in 2010, according to census statistics. Patton later warned Princetonians that a woman in her 30s looking for a husband reeks of "total desperation" and is akin to a "man repellant".

Personally, I think this is ridiculous. The point of going to higher education institutions is to learn, not check out the guy sitting behind you in class. To reduce university to a dating service is degrading to education, as well as women as a whole.

Furthermore, Patton assumes that just because a man went to Princeton, he will somehow make the best husband. I hate to break it to her, but marriage - at least a good marriage - is not a status race; husbands are not designer handbags to tote around. Even if high intelligence is your No1 factor, there are many types of intelligence and an even wider array of intelligent people - and they're not all at Princeton.