Get the Upshot in your Inbox. Although the university is coy about the exact number of Tiger-Tiger marriages, Princeton tour guides are often asked about matrimonial prospects, and sometimes include apocryphal statistics — 50 percent! Maybe 75! With an insular campus social scene, annual reunions and a network of alumni organizations in most major cities, opportunities to find a special someone wearing orange and black are many.
People care about matrimony for good reason. Society has been profoundly shaped by what academics call assortative mating: the tendency of people to marry others resembling themselves. Educationally assortative mating rose for decades after World War II, as more people went to college and more good jobs were reserved for college graduates. Income inequality is now significantly driven by well-paid college graduates marrying one another, and by poorly paid high school dropouts doing the same.
But a recent analysis of education and economic mobility complicates this story. At Princeton, and in the American higher education system as a whole, there remains a strong correlation between marriage and economic class. The data come from the Equality of Opportunity Project , which followed the economic and educational progress of Americans born between and For each year, researchers tracked who went to which college, how much money their parents made, and whether they were married in Marriage rates for young adults just out of college are low across the board.
But as people get into their 30s, trends diverge. For example, more than half of Princeton students born into upper-income households in the early s — roughly, the classes of through — were married by But for Princeton alumni from the lowest-income households — the bottom one-fifth compared with the top one-fifth — the trends are different.
Only a third were married by This pattern holds for other elite colleges and universities. For people born over the five years from to , the marriage rate for upper-income students who attended Ivy League institutions was 14 percentage points higher than the rate for lower-income students. Alana Tornello, Princeton class of , grew up in a working-class community on Staten Island.
