Some interesting stats

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Chicago ✅
21

@marlowe1 - I don’t mean a revolution - I don’t think a revolution has occurred. I just wonder if there’s some delta here. All indications point to some change occurring, in a way that’s different than other schools.

Also, I can’t find all the stats, but there has been some demographic change at Chicago. Here’s a profile of the Class of 2013:

https://web.archive.org/web/20100609232535/https://collegeadmissions.uchicago.edu/admissions/classprofile.shtml

31% of the class hailed from the midwest, 24% from the mid-atlantic or new england

Now, 26% hail from the midwest, and 34% from the mid-atlantic or new england

  • Also, the past profile doesn't provide a diversity breakdown, but currently, the class is 9% African-American and 14% latinx. This has got to be higher - maybe double - what the numbers were some time back.

Again, I’m not pointing to utter revolution - I’m just pointing out change, and change that goes in a direction that might not be what you’re talking about.

22

I would say that, based on DD’s experience, current-day Chicago seems less status-conscious than Princeton of the 80s.

23

@Cue7: I took a look at other top Midwest colleges and universities, on the theory that they would also have a lower spread. They don’t. Take a look at ND, NU, Carleton, WUSTL. St. Olaf, a relatively popular and moderately selective LAC here in MN, is the only spread more egalitarian than UChicago’s. (zero as opposed to -2).

24

@JBStillFlying : Huh? It’s no secret that there are relatively lots of high income African-American students at Harvard (and elsewhere, but not so much at Chicago), and what’s more that many of them come from actual African immigrant families, or Caribbean. But I don’t get what point you are making. Mine was that the relatively high marriage rate among low-income Chicago students – accounting for a good deal of the low gap at Chicago between high-income marriage and low-income marriage – might reflect the relative paucity of low-income African-Americans there. What’s yours?

(In any event, as I said above, the low gap is a function of a high marriage rate among alumni from poor families and a low marriage rate among alumni from relatively affluent families. Having fewer African-American students can’t explain both.)

25

@JHS , with respect to your observation at #17 as to the lesser marriage rate at age 32 of Chicago grads, I am not crestfallen. Reluctance to assume the bonds of holy matrimony is, I submit, a good indicia of a thinking person. Socrates and Aristotle had trouble in that department, and we all know about Plato. QED.

26

@JHS at #23: My point is the same “paucity” of low income AA’s at peer institutions. Something else is explaining the wider gap at those places.

The low(er) marriage rate among affluents at UChicago might be explained - at least historically - by the relatively larger presence of Jewish students. So ethnic factors may well be a consideration in these figures.

27

@Cue7 at #20:

Unless I’m misunderstanding the implications of your post, I don’t think that changing the demographic make-up of the College is going to impact much of what we are talking about, especially in the connection of low SES to things like lower marriage rates or social acceptance in school.

Even allowing for the fact that “Latinx” represents a variety of cultures and income groups, marriage rates for hispanics in this country tend to be only a few points behind non-black/non-hispanic (ie white and asian): 85% vs. 90%. And the average age of marriage is slightly lower as well (mid 20’s). That’s not even conditioning on education or income. (Source: BLS MLS Review Oct. 2013). Furthermore, there’s no evidence that any increase in representation by Black/AA students, even assuming that the rates of marriage in this group equates to that at HBCU’s (and that’s a very sweeping assumption), would a) even be in the lowest SES group; or b) even if in the lowest SES, would impact the gap all that much - Questbridge, which is a major means of recruiting for high achieving low SES applicants, only shows a 19% representation from black/AA. Three ethnic groups with historically higher overall marriage rates (by a long-shot) dominate the Questbridge demographic profile: white (51%), Hispanic/Latino (30%), and asian (29%). (Source: Questbridge website. Percentages sum to greater than 100% due to multiple ethnicities and races selected).

UChicago has a very interesting (lack of) gap. Not sure that we can point to demographic diversity (or lack thereof) as the reason. Realize you have expanded beyond the NYT conclusions in your predictions but thought I’d point this out lest there be some confusion. If we are tying a marriage gap to more status conscious experiences at school, not sure that UChicago’s changing profile is going to lead to that experience.

Just heard back from my kid and it sorta affirms what @Lea111 was saying earlier. You’d think that the Class of 2021 would be snobbier and more status-conscious than ever but my D hasn’t noticed any of that.

28

@JBStillFlying I’m not going to try to prove it at the moment, but I am morally certain that most if not all of the peer institutions have a higher number of African-Americans than Chicago among those of their students who are in the lowest income quintile. I’m not positive that means they have proportionately more African-Americans in the lowest income quintile than Chicago, but it probably does. The fact that they may also have more affluent African-Americans than Chicago does is not relevant for that. In fact, that would tend to suppress the marriage rates for their most affluent students.

As for Jews: It would stun me if they had a meaningfully lower marriage rate than the average. I know that in general marriage rates increase with income and education, and as a group Jews tend to have more than average of both. I suppose it’s possible that affluent, educated Jews have a lower marriage rate than affluent, educated other people (except for people who, for the most part, are not in the Chicago statistics, like hard-core Mormons), but it would have to be a heck of a lot lower to account for the difference.

Also, do we really think Chicago has or had 15 years ago a significantly higher proportion of Jewish students than Penn? Cornell? Fooled me.

29

Just throwing in 2 thoughts-
the UG students covered in the survey date from the time when Chicago attracted many more of the “nerdy” , life of the mind type kids than the “typical” Ivy league school. [ My kid was one of them.] Those kind of kids- which include HIgh functioning Aspies and your typical HS geeks, often have a more difficulty time socially - and have a lower marriage rates than the general highly educated population.
Chicago applicants were largely “self selecting” in those days when the admissions rate was almost 40%. So it was a magnet for nerdy , really smart, different kids.
It ALSO was a college know to be supportive LGBT students
Add those two pools of kids into the mix and I bet it explains the lower marriage rate.
hope this doesnt offend anyone, just thought it was kinda obvious how different the kind of kids that Chicago attracts today are vrs those attending in 2002-2006

30

@JHS not sure about Penn or Cornell . . .or UChicago for that matter, 15 years ago. Historically, Jews married later, had fewer kids, and higher income, were better educated, and so forth. Whether that’s true at a particular institution is beyond my pay grade. That’s in part why I said that ethnic factor may be consideration. They may not.

And I’d be surprised if there weren’t “hard-core” Mormons in the stats at UChicago. More than 20 years ago we had an LDS nanny while living in the Chicago area. She knew lots of Mormon kids at NU. We lived north of the city so didn’t know many college kids living on the south side; however in grad school I knew a sizable contingency of LDS at UChicago. UChicago always attracted a contingency of LDS and there was a local ward in Hyde Park. Proximity to a local temple was important, and in those days the Glenview temple was one of only a handful in the US.

As for your moral certitude, as much as I respect it, I can’t necessarily agree with your conclusions. But even if I did agree, the differing percentage wouldn’t change the relative gap all that much unless a good number of the lowest SES was black. According to Questbridge, that’s not the case. Also, you’d have to assume that AA’s at UChicago and peer schools would have the same marriage rates as at HBCU’s which is a pretty broad assumption.

31

@menloparkmom- your post is actually pretty interesting and speaks to the “lack of social life” argument that sometimes defined UChicago in those days. My D seems to think that a good number there now are high functioning ASD and she is definitely one to know (given that three of our other kids are in that category! LOL).

Part of the “low” marriage rate might just be the fact that UChicago students marry later than typical. Anecdotally, it seemed that way for all the UChicago colleagues I had while working in Chicago (and a good number were also Jewish - Sorry @JHS!). If, say, a higher proportion of UChicago kids move on to PhD or similar grad programs, they may delay marriage for a few years or longer. Not sure this is is the case - just another hat tossed into the speculation ring.

32

The burning question here is whether as the student body slowly pivots away from uber-nerdiness it will lose social cohesiveness - previously achieved by a universal dearth of social skills and a common devotion to the austerities of study. Is it possible to introduce elements of suavity and aplomb into this world without thereby diminishing democracy and equality? I am sure John Boyer has put his mind to this. I want to see that gap remain at -2.

33

I think it would be interesting to compare the marriage rates for students at these colleges to Chicago- Reed, Harvey Mudd, CalTech, MIT, Carleton. All have higher rates of attainment of students earning PhD’s than the Ivy’s.

http://www.thecollegesolution.com/the-colleges-where-phds-get-their-start/

34

I believe the PhD student theory more easily than I believe that whatever the difference in Jewish population is accounts for a really large difference in marriage rates. The “spectrum” theory maybe rings a little more true, but in my experience the difference between Chicago and its peers on that is one of degree, not kind. There are many “life of the mind nerds” as @menloparkmom puts it at all of these colleges, even if Chicago had a few more. And both theories would only explain the low marriage rate among the affluent, not the high marriage rate among the poor.

@JBStillFlying I don’t doubt that there were lots of Jews at Chicago. What I doubt is that there were meaningfully more of them than anywhere else. Same with LGBT students. It’s nuts to suggest that Chicago had more LGBT students than Yale or Harvard, or Columbia or . . . And certainly there are poor LGBT people.

And yes, there are probably some Mormons at Chicago, too, but not enough to move the needle. They are not hard-core, or else they wouldn’t be there; they would be at BYU. There are lots more not-so-hard-core Mormons at Stanford than any of these other colleges, and they don’t seem to give Stanford a higher marriage rate, while all the colleges with the top marriage rates are predominantly Mormon.

Here’s another explanation for the small gap: The study covered kids born 1980-1984. During the period when those kids were entering college, roughly 1997 - 2005, Chicago was in the middle of an expansion; it had meaningfully more students born in 1984 than in 1980. So at any particular measuring point, they were less likely to be married They were younger, and overall marriage rates were slowing anyway.

The only problems with this theory are (a) it doesn’t explain the relatively high low-income marriage rate, and (b) it doesn’t explain why Princeton, which was also expanding in the same period, is so different. Ah well.

At the end of the day, I still have a hard time buying @marlow1 's hypothesis that Chicago’s egalitarian culture somehow made low-income students more likely to marry while suppressing the marriage rate of high-income students. My hypothesis is that the marriage rates of the two groups are more similar at Chicago because the two groups themselves were more similar, i.e., less diverse in factors other than income. That idea at least makes sense; I’m not sure any other does.

35

@JHS - regardless of factors, there’s no doubt that, at least at the time, when it came to something huge like a marriage decision, the UChicago culture was extremely egalitarian!

Historically speaking, income has always been very correlated with likelihood of marriage. Even conditioning on some very good schools, you still see what is mimicked in the overall population: that low SES is associated with lower marriage rates. Heck - you even see that at BYU, which has one of highest marriage rates of any nationally-ranked uni. If ANY students would have a commitment to marriage above economic ranking, it would be the good kids of “Breed 'Em Young”, given the significance of that institution in their religion. UChicago is just weird - more egalitarian in this regard than BYU, and anomolous on both ends. This might defy conventional explanation, which is, in large part, why backing into @marlowe1’s conclusions might make more sense than you are willing to admit at this point. Still, there might be something that we are missing. Timewill tell all, but it would be more fun to find the reason before 10 years have passed.

BTW, you are incorrect that you are not a “hard-core” Mormon if you attend UChicago - while that might be true at Stanford (CA has a lot of “jack” Mormons), UChicago at one point tended to attract the more religiously observant. Mormons are a bit more complicated due to the fact that men (and now women) typically do their mission at 18-19 so typically would “gap” once they are accepted. It’s very easy to lose track of where their kids are going to school! And they do marry a lot younger than everyone else (though I believe their marriage rates are also falling a bit - or at least they are marrying at older ages now). Still, as I mentioned, there is a local Mormon church in Hyde Park and they tend not to establish those w/o a critical mass of church-goers. So guessing they show up in reasonable numbers. IIRC, the Chicago area had a pretty thriving Mormon community with young people at both top unis in the area who attended their religious and college catechetical meetings. That probably qualifies them as “hard-core” in your view :slight_smile: My nanny was terribly intimidated by them all (and then there was the time she showed up for Sunday meeting and Donny Osmond was greeting everyone . . . .he lived very close to us at one point).

I agree that your explanation of changing class sizes and overall marriage rates during that time period seems to make sense till you compare it to a control like Princeton, which is actually on the high side of inequality. Would hate to think it was much more so just a few years earlier! Guessing that whatever the underlying factor is, it’s something that is distinct to each school and that survives things like variable class sizes and the eschewing of traditional institutions. What would be interesting is to talk to John Boyer about this as @marlowe1 suggested. He might have a historical perspective on that -2 gap and the 46% overall marriage rate.

@menloparkmom - I couldn’t find CalTech in the search tool - maybe I was using the wrong search words. Same with HM. Carleton’s stats are like all the others. Same with Reed - only it’s marriage rate is even LOWER than UChicago’s (41%).

Also, something else to point out: UChicago is not only more egalitarian in its marriage decisions, it’s more egalitarian in SES! Take a look at how the marriage rate of the highest quintile compares to the overall rate. Am I incorrect, or isn’t it the case that the closer these two are, the more skewed the student population is to the highest (national) quintile of wealth? Reed is a great example: overall marriage rate 41%. Highest quint: 42%. Lowest: 31%. Guess which group contributed more to the overall average?

36

I’m not quite ready to let this thing go. It’s so mysterious. What does it say about anyone anyhow that he/she is married (and I suppose this means lawfully rather than common law) ten years after graduation? What does it say that there are differentials among the colleges these individuals attended? And what, after all, is magical about ten years as opposed to five or fifteen?

We have had some fun here speculating about what Chicago’s relatively low rate might mean. However, it’s worth pointing out that while low in relation to some of its peers, not especially low in relation to others. Brown, Columbia, Stanford and Harvard are within a range of +1 to +3 in relation to Chicago, looking only at the overall rate of marriage of the entire student body, including, I assume, the three middle quintiles as well as the lower and higher ones. That doesn’t really support a supposition that Chicago kids of that era were hopelessly nerdy, asocial or sexless. If they were those things, then the Stanford kids weren’t much better, and who thinks those things about Stanford kids?

No, for me, the intriguing thing about these stats is the virtual absence of differential among the quintiles for Chicago kids. Not only are the top and bottom quintiles within 2 of each other but the overall figure for the entire student body in all its quintiles is dead in the middle between. At Chicago, uniquely among its peers, it matters of marriage it matters not whether you’re rich or poor or anything in between.

Is this telling us anything more than something crazily unimportant about being married ten years after graduation? I certainly want to read it that way. Marriage is a proxy for - if not an outright cause of - a flourishing life. Many of us older heads know this, all joking aside. Here’s another obvious truth: A Princeton grad from a rich family will be almost irresistibly attractive to the opposite sex. Everything about Princeton fortifies the enormous advantage in attractiveness that wealth brings. The Princeton name, I daresay, gets you dates you wouldn’t otherwise have got without having written a best-seller. It also gets you jobs, prestige and a multitude of the other good things in life. At least if you’re top quintile or probably most of the quintiles until you get to the lowest, where a fair number of your old friends either won’t be impressed or might even be turned off and think you’ve gone highfalutin’ on them or have sold out. Not to mention that at the school itself your obvious lack of wealth in a place where wealth matters (even if its only lightly alluded to) impairs your social life. How can you compete on that field against those guys? Being an A student gets you know glory at all. That is what produces a -23 differential ten years out.

It’s different at Chicago where wealth doesn’t get you anywhere while at school and where after school nobody in the civilian world recognizes the name of your school or gets impressed by you for having been there. Or, if they do, it’s the people who know about it as a place of serious intellectual achievement - the very people who aren’t impressed by wealth.

So, if Chicago was once (and as recently as the early 2000’s) an egalitarian paradise, what is it with all the griping and kvetching about the place as it then was? The stats can help us answer that question as well. The top quintile alwalys squawks the loudest, and it is the culprit. Even at Chicago some of these folks were wealthy and some would have preferred to be at Harvard, all things considered. At Chicago they were busting their butts down on an equal playing field with everyone else. Their wealth wasn’t noticed and got them nowhere. They came out of school and no one knew the school or appreciated their prodigies of effort. Even their grades didn’t reflect their imagined self-worth. Girls didn’t see them as such great catches either. They had no edge whatever on the lowest quintile in any of these departments. Indeed, all the quintiles were rowing along in the very same boat. The lower ones liked this - it might have been the first time for many of them that they weren’t relegated to the shadows by the fancy folk. The stats are telling us that they thrived - they were married ten years out at virtually the same rates as the wealthy kids and at somewhat higher rates than kids of the lowest quintile at other schools.

None of this quite fits the narrative of the bad old days at Chicago, but it is worth pondering.

37

^^ love this narrative and it would be great if that’s the answer. The ring of speculation might be accepting a few more hats, but I’m also going to reach out to a few families whose kids attended around that time period and see what they say about these stats. I’ll report anything I find out.

As a grad student I knew many who married classmates or fellow grad students in other UChicago programs. Or professors. One explanation might be that you marry whoever you are dating when you are ready to marry - in our case it was a bit different but perhaps that’s generally true. Thinking through all the UChicago marriages I can think of two divorces- one surprising and another that had been predicted for years. My impression has always been that the compatibility factor was pretty high among those who got hitched to fellow UChicago types. Tossing one more hat, I will speculate that perhaps many in the College were similarly picky and unwilling to settle for an incompatible, so stayed single as a result until a much later age, then settled down after finding a soul mate based on factors other than income. Had they gone on to grad school at UChicago, they may well have found someone much earlier!

38

One technical note: I believe what the study cited did was to look at the marriage status at a particular point in time (December 31, 2014) of people born 1981-1983, who applied for federally subsidized college loans. So it wasn’t 10 years after graduation for everyone; it was a varying period of time.

What that also means is that the highest-income quintile population in the data base is not comprehensive, since I don’t think anyone who failed to apply for loans is in the data set.

Looking at some of the other work that’s been done with the same database, here’s my current speculation. The lowest-income quintile has a high marriage rate compared with peers because Chicago’s racial mixture skews while. The highest-income quintile has a low marriage rate compared with peers because Chicago’s affluent students were less adept at getting the highest-paid jobs and tend(ed) to make somewhat less than alumni of peer colleges.

39

UChicago, Princeton and Harvard are all currently 43% white, per College Navigator. Are you saying that UChicago was “whiter” at one point?

40

Yale 46% White, Reed 59%.