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Comment by rb808 | Hacker News Reader

> Share of couples in which both partners have a college degree: now up to 15%

Wow I'm out of touch with the real world.

There is a little asterisk under the chart that clarifies that they are talking specifically about FOUR-YEAR DEGREES. That makes much more sense.

There are a lot of people attending community colleges or getting their associate’s degrees.

Otherwise I’d be pretty shocked if it was all degrees. 15% is way too low for that....at least I’d think.

Only 1/3 of adults have four-year degrees. If dating were purely random you’d expect about 11% of marriages to be between partners with degrees, so this figure is perhaps a little lower than what I’d expect but not too far off.

Adults is a very wide range, younger people are more likely to get married (aka not be married) and significantly more likely to have a collage education.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...

Sure, but the original quote about 15% of couples having dual degrees also looked at the whole population. What you’re saying is true but isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison in this case.

To be more clear, the married population is very different from the total population. People are also likely to match with people of similar ages.

  20-24 years	9.7%
  25-29 years	32.9%
  30-34 years	52.4%
  35-39 years	63.3%
  40-44 years	65.5%
  45-49 years	65.4%
  50-54 years	65.3%
  55-64 years	65.6%
  65-74 years	64.4%
  75-84 years	54.2%
  85+ years	33.4%

So 50+ population is more than twice as likely to be married vs 20-29, but the 20-29 population is significantly more likely to have a degree. Modeling this correctly would be a little more difficult than just saying % married with degree vs. total population with degree as you need to look at population sizes and age ranges that get married etc.

Data from https://www.census.gov/data/tables/2016/demo/families/cps-20..., though I did some basic math to compare Married Spouse Present + Married Spouse Absent vs total population.

Outside of major cities, the rate drops substantially.

Also, many more women than men are college educated now, which is distorting dating in interesting ways, since most women (and some men) tend to want to date someone who is at least their equal with employment and/or education.

> Also, many more women than men are college educated now

No, not even close:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attai...

https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publicatio...

Err -- did you look at your graph? Your first link shows that 2017 was the first year that more women were educated then men....and your second link is from 2015, before the flip.

Of course I looked at the graph. Even though women earned more degrees than men in 2017, for nearly the entire history of the country, men earned substantially more college degrees than women. Thus, men currently hold significantly more than half of the college degrees right now. We're talking about prevalence, not incidence.

You are correct, but current college graduates (so 56% of them women) are in the "dating pool" much more so than the 60-year olds (where a higher percentage of men are educated, but not much dating going on).

Your own links support my statement.

Here is some additional data from the Department of Education demonstrating that women make up 56% of college students nationwide:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_303.70.a...

And some lighter reading on the topic if you're not into reviewing raw numbers.

https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/08/why-me...

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/11/gender-...

You might have a personal opinion on the data, or maybe you don't like the data, but data is data.

Keep in mind that these appear to be for the population as a whole. Since women have overtaken men recently from what used to be a pretty significant disparity, that should mean that recent years have seen a significantly higher proportion of women getting college degrees vs. men.

It's not significantly higher. And we are talking about the population as a whole. I'm refuting the point that "many more women than men are college educated now". This is incorrect. See my other response regarding incidence vs. prevalence.

But we should not be talking about the population as a whole - just the 25-35 year-old segment who are in the dating pool. And in that age group, college-educated women may outnumber men.

They have to, and by a significant margin, for the trends in the graph on the OP's source to obtain.

'Distorting' is an interesting choice of a word for a factually incorrect statement.

Here's the data. Could you point out what's factually incorrect? https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_303.70.a...

Did you think it'd be higher or lower?

I think they mean: wow, that's way lower than I expected. I had the same reaction, as virtually every couple I know both have college degrees.

Historically, men date down (professionals marrying their executive admins, nurses marrying doctors) whereas women will not, so this percentage is based on how many college eduated women can find equally or greater educated, eligible men. Citation below.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/nov/10/dating-...

If women don't date down, then the higher they go, the fewer men there will be, its lonely at the top.

Yes, there are hundreds of articles about this. See for example: "The Mating Crisis Among Educated Women"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15736410

sounds like higher

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