WSJ & Forbes Rankings

Mastadon
Sun, 16 Sep 2018 16:41:50 +0000

@prezbucky - As it it turns out, reporting on “marriage metrics” is not particularly valid either…

Did you know that 60 percent of Bates alums marry fellow alums? If you do know this “fact,” it’s time to forget it.

Untrue though it is, the 60 percent fact still circulates among Batesies and gets passed on from generation to generation.

The accurate figure, as of 2010, is approximately 12.5 percent. Of the 23,356 living alums in the Bates database, 2,914 have a spouse or partner who is also a Bates alum. (If you include alums whose Bates spouse or partner is deceased, the number creeps up a few points.)

(UPDATE: As of Feb. 13, 2015, of the 25,199 living alums in the Bates database in 2015, 2,956 have a spouse or partner who is also a Bates alum. That puts the marriage rate at 11.7 percent.)

In fact, I found that other colleges of our ilk also tend to have a mythical marriage statistic. At Colby, the myth is 50 percent and the reality 11 percent, while at Carleton it’s 60 and 15 percent, respectively. At Middlebury, the numbers are 60 and 13 percent.