Students fail to find love in the library

Students outnumber lecturers as subscribers to Dateline, Britain's largest computer dating agency, putting paid to the image of student life as a hedonistic, promiscuous whirl.

About 450 undergraduate lonely hearts and 250 college and university lecturers use the service to look for love, according to a survey of the occupations of 250,000 clients. Operations director Guy Morris said that different amounts of pressure on today's students might prevent them from finding happiness early in life.

"For many people, and students are the same as those that teach them, there just isn't time to go out to clubs or pubs in the speculative hope of finding Mr or Ms Right. Getting good grades requires that a lot of time be spent in the library rather than in the union bar."

Richard Darlington, of the National Union of Students, said: "It kind of blows the idea that we all go to university for a free-for all".