HARVARD AND YALE BIRTH RATES 
Graduates of Men’s Colleges Do Not Make Satisfactory Showing, But Are Yet 
50 to 100% Ahead of Graduates of Women’s Colleges 
HE inadequate marriage and 
| birth rates of the graduates of 
the great women’s colleges of 
the United States has often been 
pointed out by eugenicists. In many 
cases the apologists of the women’s 
colleges have replied that these rates 
merely reflected the situation of the 
class from which college girls come, and 
charged that the graduates of the large 
men’s colleges of the East would be 
found to have an equally bad showing. 
It was more than once alleged that the 
men, not the women, were to be blamed 
for the race suicide of this educated 
class. 
Until now, there have been no ade- 
quate studies of the marriage and birth- 
rates of the large universities for men 
in the eastern United States. Dr. John 
C. Phillips has met the need by a very 
careful study of the figures of forty 
years at Yale and Harvard. He shows 
that their graduates marry in at least 
50% more cases than do the graduates 
of the large women’s colleges and, what 
is still more important, that the number 
of children per graduate is from 50% 
to 100% greater. 
Dr. Phillips has published! an account 
of his research, which is given slightly 
condensed, herewith: 
“My attention was called to college 
birth rate by reading the various papers 
in the JOURNAL OF HEREDITY on ‘Race 
Suicide,’ and the birth rate of the 
graduates of women’s colleges. There 
did not seem to be any data of the same 
sort for the larger men’s colleges, and I 
was particularly interested to see 
whether the rate had changed in recent 
years. The only available source from 
which to extract this information for 
Harvard University was the class re- 
ports. Harvard and Yale are here 
considered in the same way. In the 
case of Harvard the reports became 
fairly trustworthy for the Class of 1853, 
and for Yale they were usable back to 
the Class of 1850. I did not attempt to 
record births later than the Class of 
1890, for the twenty-five year report of 
this class was just published at the time 
this work was done (summer of 1915), 
and earlier class reports are of little 
interest where the total number of 
children is sought for. 
“All the figures involved in making 
up the final averages are based on 
class reports. All the available reports 
of every class have been tabulated and 
each name checked up on each report. 
Only those men whose records were 
fragmentary were left out, and this 
omission has the following tendency. 
It vitiates the two divisions, ‘Children 
Born per Graduate’ and ‘Children 
Surviving per Graduate.’ The effect is 
to lower slightly both these figures, for 
a few graduates with no history or only 
partial history appear here as having 
no children. This was necessary in 
order to get a true index of the birth 
rate of married graduates, but, as will 
be seen later on, the error is extremely 
small except in the first decade of 
Harvard records. It does not affect 
at all the columns ‘Children Born per 
Married Graduate’ and ‘Children Sur- 
viving per Married Graduate.’ These 
last are the items which interest us 
most, because the percentage of gradu- 
ates who have married is a nearly 
constant one in the forty years included 
in this study. 
“It is only necessary here to sum- 
marize the work in terms of decade 
averages for each coilege, and I have 
attempted to answer the following 
questions: What per cent of graduates 
of Harvard and Yale marry? How long 
after graduation do they marry, and 
has this interval changed? How many 
children does each married graduate 
1In the Harvard Graduates’ Magazine, XXV, No. 97, pp. 25-34, September, 1916. 
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