What I remember most about freshman orientation at Tufts is meeting friends, getting absurdly lost on campus, and purchasing an enormous “Starry Night” poster for my basement dorm room. The more “serious” and official parts of the week are less clear. I vaguely recall a workshop on academic integrity and an icebreaker game that involved M&Ms. I also remember bits and pieces of the “In the Sack” consent education program, as well as the overdone film on campus shootings. In the rush of the week and my own naïveté, I conflated the two safety awareness presentations as equal threats, failing to realize that, while there would be no campus shootings over the next four years, a number of the friends I was making would be victims of sexual assault.

The lessons on consent, sexual assault, and healthy relationships that colleges offer during orientation programs are notoriously campy, to the point where many students regard them as humorous entertainment. Earlier this year, a succession of scandals revealed a deeply entrenched problem with the way colleges across the country deal with cases of sexual assault. Officials at different schools routinely failed to investigate sexual assault cases, offer support to survivors, and prosecute perpetrators. In a case at University of Southern California that was dismissed in May, the school’s student affairs office wrote a letter to the victim—who earlier presented authorities with four recordings of what she said are confessions by her attacker—explaining that she and her attacker “agreed they had sexual intercourse together. This office acknowledges that their perspectives on the sexual intercourse differ.”

In response to the bad publicity, colleges have rushed to amend both their punishment guidelines and their consent and sexual assault education programs. However, some efforts, like Yale’s mass email laying out eight hypothetical scenarios that might fall under the university’s punishable definition of “nonconsensual sex,” struck some students as a continuation of insufficient—and unintentionally comical—teaching on consent and sexual assault.

“[Consent education] can’t be something colleges are checking off,” said Alexandra Brodsky, a student at Yale Law School and founding co-organizer of Know Your IX. “There is an important difference between being blurry and being complex. Sexual violence is certainly complex, but it’s not blurry. I think that in the attempt to acknowledge the nuances, schools sometimes end up presenting consent as a debatable issue.”

Significant changes need to be made to college’s consent education programs. But it also seems like more can be done to teach students about sexual assault and consent before they arrive on campus. Consent education is rarely a component of high school sex education curriculum. “Due to the limits on time imposed on teachers, they end up needing to make some really tough choices about what topics they can cram into very limited amounts of time with their students,” said Nora Gelperin, director of training at Answer, the national sexuality education organization based at Rutgers University. “Unfortunately, it tends to be that teachers focus on what they see as the core content, which is generally pregnancy prevention and STD/HIV prevention. What suffers is all the other very important topics, like teen dating violence, issues around consent, body image, healthy relationships.”