1 82 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



play in reproduction of race. If the term highly educated is here 

 used it refers solely to the college graduate. 



A high marriage rate and an average of 2.1 surviving children to 

 the graduate family as compared to 1.9 for the native-born male 

 throughout the state tells us plainly that, contrary to all theory and 

 supposition, higher education does not mean diminished reproduction. 

 It is the American nationality that stands for lessened marriage and 

 low birth rate, in striking contrast to the foreign -born of our citizens 

 with families of from 3 to 5 children, 4.5 in Massachusetts with 3 

 surviving, and this is true for all classes of foreign-born. 



Graduates as a group make an exceptionally good showing, and 

 college alumni are to be congratulated upon the standard maintained; 

 the net fecundity is greater, family size is larger than that of the 

 general native population and marriage rate of some groups is higher, 

 so that reproduction is more nearly approximated by the college grad- 

 uate family. Contrary to European statistics for professional men, 

 who, as already stated, are assumed to have a marriage rate two thirds 

 less than the average male of the population, class reproduction for 

 college graduates is higher than it is for the population at large. 



The average marriage rate for 1,614 graduates of the classes 1870- 

 77 from Yale, Princeton, Brown and Bowdoin is 79,4 per cent, and for 

 a corresponding group of Harvard graduates, 1,401 of the classes 

 1872-80, it is 71.4 per cent., a rate so much lower than that for 

 graduates at the other institutions named that we must differentiate. 

 The average of these 3,015 alumni of both groups is 75.7 per cent. 



The marriage rate of Harvard graduates varies so much from that 

 of the alumni of all other institutions so far investigated that the 

 Cambridge graduate can evidently not serve in this respect as an 

 index for family conditions among college men any more than he 

 can be looked upon as representative of that other element of the 

 highly educated portion of our population, the female college graduate 

 with a marriage rate of from 30 per cent, to 50 per cent, or, for still 

 another, the highly educated man who has never received an academic 

 degree and this, as has recently been shown, is a surprisingly large 

 number in this country. The general marriage average of 79.4 per 

 cent, for a group of graduates from four colleges and 71.4 per cent, for 

 Harvard alumni must be compared with 79.02 per cent, for the native 

 male population of the age group 40-49 years, and is greatly to the 

 credit of college men. By reason of this high marriage rate the 

 number of surviving children for 100 graduate members of a group 

 or class, married and unmarried, is larger than it is for the less 

 highly educated and in fact larger than it is for all other elements 

 of our native male population, even where the number of children 



