More Married Men, More Children

A study of the pattern of family life among Dartmouth alumni shows

A CHANGING pattern of family life among Dartmouth alumni is pictured by Arnold S. Linsky '54 in a recent paper prepared on the basis of a survey he made in his senior year as a sociology major. His findings indicate that Dartmouth men in the younger alumni classes are getting married in greater numbers, are having larger families, and are doing both at an earlier age, than was true of the graduates in preceding classes.

Linsky's conclusions are drawn from a survey covering a period of fifty years and from data supplied by fourteen alumni classes spanning that many years. The fourteen Dartmouth classes in the survey ranged from 1899 to 1952 and were chosen at five-year or three-year intervals. College records were used for the older Classes of 1899, 1904, 1909, 1914 and 1919. Questionnaires were mailed to an adequate sampling of the Classes of 1934, 1929, 1933. 1930, 1939. !942, 1945- 1 and 1952. The response to the questionnaires was exceptionally high, totaling 88 per cent of the entire sample.

In the marital part of this study, Linsky finds that Dartmouth men sixteen or less years out of college are married in far greater numbers than were earlier graduates at the same age, and that among this younger group a propensity for matrimony before they reached the age of 25 is especially marked.

In the Class of 1904, for example, only seven per cent were married before 25 years of age; but in the Classes of 1939, 1942 and 1945, more than forty per cent had wives by then. Among recent graduates, the proportion married before 30 also showed a substantial increase over earlier classes. In the Class of 1904, again, 46 per cent were married before they had reached go, while among the men who had graduated in the late Thirties and early Forties, the proportion had almost doubled, with eighty per cent married at age 29 or younger.

A progressive decline in the number of bachelors during the last thirty years is also indicated by the Dartmouth alumni study. About 85 per cent of alumni from earlier classes eventually married, while 95 per cent of the classes of the late Twenties and Thirties have taken wives.

Other colleges reveal a similar marital pattern among their alumni. At Princeton, 84 per cent in the classes 1900 to 1902 eventually married, as did 77 per cent in the classes of 1819 to 1900 at Harvard. In a study of 29 colleges, the Population Reference Bureau reported that 92 per cent of the male graduates of the Class of 1922 were married; and for the Class of 1928 in 121 colleges, 94 per cent were married. College men in general, national studies show, are now exceeding the rest of the population in the proportion embracing matrimony.

However, Dartmouth and other college alumni still lag behind the median age for marriage for all males in the United States, which was 25.9 years in 1900 and 23.7 years in 1947. This lag is largely explained by the fact that college men must necessarily postpone the start of earning a living.

Even more striking than the new marital pattern, writes Linsky, is the change in the number of children reported by Dartmouth families since the end of the war. In this respect the Dartmouth alumni study runs parallel to the national trend. "The period covered by this study of the Dartmouth alumni begins," Linsky writes, "at the lowest point in the decline of fertility among college graduates. Starting around 1900, the falling fertility rates for the College alumni began an upward trend that is still going on."

For the Dartmouth Classes of 1899 and 1904, the study arrived at an average of 1.8 children per married graduate. The Class of 1936 had 3.0 children per married graduate and the average for the Class of 1939 was 2.4. Only twelve years after graduation, the Class of 1942 already averaged 2.4 children per married man.

Studies undertaken at Princeton and Harvard show the same trend with regard to family size. For the class of 1900 at Harvard and Princeton the average for all members was 1.45 children, and for the Harvard classes of 1916 through 1920 it was 1.73 children. Dartmouth men increased their average from 1.65 for all members of 1900 to 1.8 for members of the Class of 1919 and 2.1 for the Class of 1929.

The Class of 1929 followed an interesting course. The depression slowed down its normal birth rate for fifteen years after graduation and up to that point it trailed the Class of 1919. From then on, however, 1929 began to catch up, finally ending up in the survey at 2.0 children per class member as compared with 1919's average of 1.8. The depression evidently did not diminish the number of children but only delayed them.

Other findings in the Linsky report are that one-child families are on the decline and three-children families in the ascendancy. In the Class of 1899 the sample revealed that thirteen per cent of its married men had one child, while for the Class of 1936 only eight per cent reported one child. For 1899 about nineteen per cent had families of three children; while in the Class of 1939, which is still producing, 38 per cent already report that number. Also noteworthy is the observation that there is an increase in the proportion of graduates with four, five and more children. Conversely, childless marriages have steadily decreased, the Class of 1899 re" porting 21 per cent and the Class of 1936 only six per cent.

There are almost as many explanations, learned and otherwise, as there are statistics for this "marriage and baby boom." However, the facts plainly reveal that the more recent Dartmouth graduate is willing to accept the rewards and responsibilities of marriage and children earlier, and to a degree not shared by his college-bred father and grandfather.

The interest in population studies begun by Arthur Linsky in his sociology courses at Dartmouth is now being continued at the University of Washington where he is doing graduate work in the field of population. His project on the pattern of family life among Dartmouth alumni was carried out under the supervision of Prof. Robert Gutman, whose sociology courses include one on population problems.