Rachel Dempsey am, Jan 24, The two eventually started dating, and have been married since College has long been a place where young adults begin to think about the rest of their lives, and in many cases that includes marriage.
But with a recent article in the New York Times indicating that 51 percent of women in the United States are single β and with research showing that long-term relationships between college students are on the decline β it seems the old cliche that women attend an Ivy League school to snag a successful husband is obsolete. Although most Yalies say they eventually plan to get married, many students said as long as they are in college, they will only be thinking about marriage in the abstract.
While her own parents met at Yale and married afterwards, she said, her experience around the time of her own graduation was that marriage was by no means a priority among her friends. United States census data indicates that the average age at which people get married has risen consistently over the last several decades for both men and women, which could explain why the percentage of people who meet their spouses in college has steadily declined in the same time period, University of Texas at Austin sociology professor Norval Glenn said.
According to a study he cited, almost 40 percent of married or divorced women who graduated from college in the years leading up to met their first spouse in college, but that number has dropped to just over 15 percent today. Administrators at the Association of Yale Alumni said the University does not keep track of alumni marriages, but some students said anecdotal evidence indicates that at least in previous generations, marriages between Yalies were relatively common.
But while she and her friends would joke about marriage, Dohrmann said, none of them could imagine being in a similar situation. Although some current Yalies said they could not imagine marrying any of their classmates, many students and alums speculated that Yale graduates may eventually be attracted to each other years out of college because they share the common experience of a Yale education, or because of the values that drove them both to Yale in the first place.
