BIRTH RATES OF COEDUCATIONAL GRADUATES 



MRS. CAROLINE H. ROBINSON 



Swarthmore, Pennsylvania 



It has long been known that the college graduates' birth rate is unsatis- 

 factory, at least in the Eastern United States. 



Now, when a business is going regularly into the red, it becomes the duty 

 of the owners or of the receiver to examine the leaks through which profits 

 are draining away. Every abnormality in the figures is searched out with 

 minutiae and determination. At Harvard, indeed, such determined atten- 

 tion has been bestowed on the birth rate by Dr. J. C. Phillips. 



In the same spirit and with greater minutiae, the records of a leading 

 coeducational college have been examined. As colleges of this type have 

 not been greatly studied, one naturally hopes that here the record will be a 

 little better. I find it is better, especially among the men. 



This college was selected for intensive study also because the graduates 

 were personally known to the Alumni Recorder. Thus in the 17 classes 

 studied intensively, only 8 graduates had been completely lost track of, 

 and of the remaining 765 graduates appearing in my tables, 95 per cent 

 were more or less personally known to the Alumni Recorder. Thus we are 

 able to say, for instance, about divorce or separation: we know of only 17 

 cases in the 545 marriages. This is in harmony with Dr. Popenoe's co- 

 educational findings. At Harvard, however, Dr. Phillips is much con- 

 cerned about divorce. 



AMOUNT OF MARRIAGE 



These men graduates are of a type much more given to marriage than 

 Harvard men, one quarter of whom have remained single with great con- 

 sistency over half a century of classes. Only one-seventh of these coedu- 

 cational men graduates fail to marry. Moreover, death in their prime is 

 often what has forestalled marriage. Of the 88 per cent 1 who survived to 

 age 45 and older, only 11 per cent were single, which is the exact percentage 

 of men in the United States census of 1920 who were single in the age class 

 45 to 64 years. 



1 Only 76 per cent of the men for whom no marriage is recorded survived till their 25th 

 reunion, but 93 per cent of the married survived. 



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