A recent piece in the New York Times has some unusual stats on Chicago and its peers - percentage of graduates married at the age of 32 (for classes graduating 2002 to 2006). Chicago’s overall percentage (46) is the lowest in the group of ivies and ivy-pluses, but not that much lower than Brown (47), Columbia (48) or Stanford (49). More interesting is the spread at these schools as between the marriage rates of the highest quintile (in family wealth) and the lowest quintile. At Princeton the spread is 56/34 (i.e. -22). At Yale it is 52/40. At Harvard 51/37. At no school other than Chicago is the differential less than -7. At Chicago it is 47/45 (-2). The writer draws the conclusion that at most elite schools poor kids feel significantly less included in the social life of the school. The article highlights one such case. If that is so, then one could draw the corollary conclusion that at Chicago poor kids are less likely to feel social seclusion. I speculate that family wealth doesn’t get the respect that it gets at other schools and that poor kids accordingly feel less their own lack of affluence. That was the way it was in my time many years ago. We were all snobs of a distinctive Chicago variety - of the intellect. All kids rich and poor felt they were being measured by the same standard - intellectual performance. Perhaps that ethos still applies today. It makes all Chicago kids a bit less social and hence less likely to be married by ten years out of school. However it may also create a certain egalitarian esprit peculiar to Chicago.
There is no doubt that (and there are many articles and evidence) that a social strata exists at elite colleges. Applicants are so excited to be admitted to a top college and then the reality of that strata hits them like a ton of bricks when they attend.
Just checked the spread for BYU*: -7; certainly on the low end but not out of the ballpark. So UChicago’s numbers really are interesting.
*This just seems like another school in which you’d see relatively equal marriage rates among the different socio-economic strata, especially since (early) marriage is so strongly encouraged in the Mormon faith.
The data analyzed is somewhat old though - it covers grads from like 2002 - 2006. It’d be more interesting - down the line - to capture the data for the more recent classes - to see if the spread has increased.
I believe classes at Chicago now are wealthier than they have been in the past (with probably a broader gulf between the wealthy and poor) and it’s possible the spread will increase when analyzing the more recent classes.
I do think there is a contrast between the pre-Zimmer and post- Zimmer demographics for the College.
“The data analyzed is somewhat old though - it covers grads from like 2002 - 2006”
Yeah, but the metric is whether they were married by age 32 (so 10 years after grad). Maybe the 2002 data is old but the 2006 data includes follow-up data from 2016.
@Cue7 , I read this data not merely as telling us that there are fewer wealthy kids at Chicago (at least as of 2002-2006) than at peer schools but as suggesting, whatever their numbers, that the social tone of the school is not dictated by those kids in the way it is at other schools. I try to look at this as Max Weber would look at it: what is the ethos of this social group? At Chicago it is an egalitarian intellectual one, and the wealthy kids have internalized it as fully as the poor kids. This makes Chicago significantly different from other schools. One feels this experientially and anecdotally, but such things are hard to measure. The statistics in this article do, however, appear to do this. Certainly wealthy kids can be just as focussed on the life of the mind as poor kids, and certainly there are wealthy kids of that sort at all schools. But here’s the difference: the royal road to social success at the University of Chicago lies not in the percs, privileges and material possessions of wealth but in being smart and thoughtful, even eccentric and interestingly odd. That’s a game rich and poor alike can play, and that’s why the poor kids do not feel socially isolated merely because they are poor. That’s what these stats are telling us.
@JBStillFlying - the key metric to use is when those students were in Chicago’s college. 2002 -2006 is still all pre Zimmer pre nondorf.
My sense is that while @marlowe1 is correct in saying there may be a type of egalitarian intellectual ethos at Chicago, that view may be getting a little less pronounced.
Put another way, is anyone confident that chicago has gotten more egalitarian from an intellectual perspective, or more wealthy and pre-professional/status conscious over the past ten years?
@JBStillFlying and @marlowe1 - yeah, I’m not surprised that Chicago was more egalitarian in the past. What I’m most interested in seeing, however, is the delta over time. Especially with the advent of ED and Chicago’s rise in wealthy circles, what has the change looked like?
We won’t know the answers (at least in terms of this study) for another decade. My hunch, though, is the college population is getting wealthier/more status oriented, and the disparities in wealth and interests are getting more stark.
You’re not taking my point, Cue. To the extent that there will be more rich kids in future at Chicago (which I’m not conceding in any event until the data is in) the stamp that their enhanced numbers will put on the place will depend on what sub-set of the rich these kids are and whether, once arrived on campus, they will drink the elixir of the place. Weber, not Marx, should be our guide! The rich may be different from you and me, as Fitzgerald remarked to Hemingway, but there are different ways of being different (which is what Hemingway should have said in reply instead of, “Yeah, they have more money.”)
You’re also being sort of a closet purist. Chicago’s ethos could shift a bit toward the mainstream without that constituting an indictment of it or undermining all its claim to be different from other schools. It could still be different, just less so or with practical alterations - old wine in new bottles.
To stick another skeptical pin in @marlowe1 's balloon: One of the changes that has happened in the Zimmer era has been much better financial aid for low income students, with the Odyssey scholarships, and a huge push to market the college to lower income applicants. Chicago was definitely behind the curve on that relative to its peers/competitors. It may be that in 2001-2006 Chicago was more egalitarian in part because there were meaningfully fewer low income students.
From what I remember of my children’s lives, I think there were definitely circles at Chicago where wealth mattered, but it certainly wasn’t characteristic of the college social life overall. Those people mainly kept to themselves and entertained each other. I definitely know people who felt oppressed by the ostentatious wealth of fellow students at Columbia and Penn in the past decade.
I suppose that could be a factor, @JHS , though doesn’t seem sufficient to explain just what an outlier Chicago is here - number 671 of 697 schools of all kinds, with really significant disparities with all the elite schools.
Let’s suppose, as you suggest, that there were not as many truly disadvantaged kids at Chicago 2001-2006 so that the lowest quintile would have consisted more of working class and even lower-middle class kids. I am not a sociologist, but I would speculate that that sort of kid would feel just as excluded and out of it in a social scene reeking of privilege as would a kid further down the ladder. Indeed, the sting can be greater if the proximity is greater. I have some personal experience of this.
I also checked out some schools which I imagined would likewise not at that time have had a large representation of the very poor: Vanderbilt (-17); Duke (-10); Swarthmore (-20); SMU (-14); TCU (-15). Chicago’s stat (-2) requires a stronger explanation than you are offering.
You keep trying and failing to puncture my bubble: the most obvious explanation of the stats is that something different and greater than socio-economic status is at work in unifying the culture of this campus.
@marlowe1 - eh, I think the impact of ED, a sky-high US News ranking, a larger (and more practical) career office, less grade deflation, and the advent of terms like “business” in the economics program point to something else.
Sure, maybe in the past rich kids and poor kids had the same ethos. Why would all these external changes not create some change - some uptick in status consciousness and more wealth?
Put another way, I never thought Chicago’s college would produce just as many bankers as Columbia and Duke, but here you go:
I don’t think Chicago would’ve produced as many (even per capita) in 2002-2006, I really don’t.
(Btw, when we talk about change, the link shows that Chicago had one of the biggest increases in bank recruiter interest, a year over year increase of 15%.)
UChicago really isn’t the kind of school that comes to mind when your goal is to “socialize among the rich, marry for love” (as one friend’s mom was advised many years ago). The school doesn’t have the eating or finals clubs that characterize(d) a few of the Ivies, nor does it have a multi-generational component historically affiliated with Eastern Seaboard “society” (Philly, NY, Boston, etc.). Not sure if anyone has seen Whit Stillman’s self-absorbed film “Cosmopolitan” but to the extent it realistically captures the social differences between the moneyed and the non-moneyed at Princeton and similar, it really doesn’t remind me at all of the environment at UChicago. These are cultural norms and they change slowly, if at all. The best remedy for change, by the way, is to disperse the wealthy among many different schools so that the impact at any particular one is marginal at best. Perhaps that’s what elite colleges are doing, to some extent.
What could be impacting the spreads is that the “current generation” of low-income high achievers won’t realize the social benefits of an elite education simply because they weren’t born into money and opportunity in the first place. Their children, however, will be, and so might have a very different experience once they get to college. In this case, a top education is correlated with, but not a cause of, a rise in the various spheres of influence (social, leadership etc.). Other factors would be the cause. If this is indeed the case, that makes UChicago’s relatively small spread even more extraordinary, since at least at one point they seem to have been selecting on those other factors. Either that, or a social life of any sort historically didn’t exist at UChicago!
The bottom quintile in the study means the bottom quintile nationally, not the bottom quintile of students at each university. (I was wrong in understanding it until I looked at the article more carefully.) Realistically, what it may mean is that there are a lot fewer people to measure for that figure than there are for the top quintile figure, which may represent 60-70% of the students at many of these colleges.
I don’t disagree with you, though, that there was (and probably still is) an egalitarian culture at Chicago, one that does not reward displays or applications of wealth. I’m less certain, however, that it’s so unique to Chicago as to explain this particular set of data. (I don’t know what Yale is like now, but when I went there it was the same way. Anyone who engaged in ostentatious displays of wealth would be mocked and even ostracized for it. Students with huge trust funds lived like paupers and worked for pay. Meritocracy was very much the order of the day.)
I don’t know about the other colleges you cite, but you are dead wrong about Swarthmore, certainly (high endowment, high outreach to low income students, Quaker identity = no bling anywhere). I’m also not certain how your theory accounts for the huge gap at Concordia and the negative correlation between wealth and marriage at Susquehanna.
Another speculation: I believe Chicago has particularly struggled to attract African-American students. They were a tiny percentage of the student body when my kids were there, definitely smaller than at peers. African-Americans have a very low marriage rate in general. Is it possible that one of the things this gap is measuring is the relative representation of African-Americans in the top and bottom income quintile at the college?
There you again, @Cue7 , equating “some uptick” with utter revolution.
All those factors will have an effect on culture. I’m not in love with some of them, I admit. However, as @JBStillFlying has said, culture is a sticky thing. Many of those kids bound for business will have selected Chicago because it also has the core and the other things we traditionalists love about the place. Many will not have come from super-rich families - indeed, I suspect that a poor kid will be more likely than a rich one to have a pre-professional orientation. On the other hand many, perhaps most, old-style Chicago ponderers of the meaning of things will be from families of wealth. Read your Thomas Mann.
The stats are telling us that at Chicago some of these categories will get together in love or friendship, joined by a common devotion to Aristotle.
A few more observations before I stop thinking about this.
As expected, HBCUs have the lowest marriage rates in every category – really ultra low. Cheyney has almost the same rate for top-quintile and bottom-quintile graduates, but that rate is 11-12%.
Chicago does have a relatively low percentage of African-Americans, which may explain why its bottom-quintile marriage rate is actually relatively high compared to its peers (most of them), but hardly explains why its top-quintile marriage rate is so low compared to the same group.
The gap thing is really interesting, because it varies so widely between otherwise fairly similar schools. But ultimately I’m not certain @marlowe1 wants to be bragging about the culture that apparently gives the average Chicago student an 18% lower chance of marriage within 10 years of graduation (roughly) than people who go to Duke, and 14% less than people who go to Princeton, Penn, Dartmouth and Cornell (but about the same as Brown or UCLA). That’s a puzzler. And the differences are even greater if you happen to come from the top income quintile (as a majority of students at Chicago and its peers do).
The problem with measuring the representation of “African-Americans” is that, at the time, the category included Black students who were not necessarily descended from African American families.
Good on you, @JHS , for picking up that nuance with respect to the quintiles. I missed it as well. I do believe it reinforces the point: We are looking at all schools at the very same set of representatives of the highest and lowest quintiles. Why is it then that the stats are so exceptionally different as between Chicago and virtually all other schools? Of course you know my answer to that question. Can you think of a better one?
