Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/186

182 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 graduate 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 187077 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