"The next most interesting figure is the 'Children Surviving per Capita
per Graduate.' This has fallen from over 2.50 to about 1.9. The per cent
of childless marriages increased very markedly during the first two
decades and held nearly level for the last two decades. For the last
decade at Yale it has even dropped slightly, an encouraging sign. It is
worthy of note that the number of children born to Yale graduates is
almost constantly a trifle higher than that for Harvard, while the
number of childless marriages is slightly less." This is probably owing
to the larger proportion of Harvard students living in a large city.
If the birth-rate of graduates both of separate men's colleges and of
separate women's colleges is alarmingly low, that of graduates of
coeducational institutions is not always satisfactory, either. To some
extent the low birth-rate is a characteristic of educated people,
without regard to the precise nature of their education. In a study of
the graduates of Syracuse University, one of the oldest coeducational
colleges of the eastern United States, H. J. Banker found[123] that the
number of children declined with each decade. Thus married women
graduates prior to the Civil War had 2 surviving children each; in the
last decade of the nineteenth century they had only one.
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