This Saturday’s homecoming dance begs the same question it does every year: is college really the time or place for a school dance? The short answer is yes. The long answer is heck yes.

College students have the perfect kind of freedom to really amplify the school dance experience. Unhindered by hovering parents, curfews, dress codes, or crippling hormonal spikes, college students actually have the best chance at having a genuinely good time at a dance function. The fact that anything as fun and lighthearted as a school dance is even wasted on a group of people as angsty as pubescent high schoolers is a small outrage.

Here in Bakersfield, especially, the number one complaint among college kids is how little there is to do, and it’s hard to argue with them when the most exciting event here in the last six months was the opening of a Krispy Kreme donut shop. A Saturday night dance full of friends and food sounds like an amazing antidote for this city’s slightly-stagnant social scene.

A homecoming dance is typically an event shrouded in pop-cultural lore. It’s the place where girls and boys lock eyes across crowded rooms, kings and queens are made (or dethroned), and, depending on your movie reference, killer maniacs dismember all the preppy kids. Unfortunately, real high schoolers are too awkward to pull off that kind of artful social technique. To make a homecoming dance truly great, rife with good humor, and exactly the right amount of drama, fill it with college students – an entire demographic that lives for nostalgia, free food, and loud music.