I enjoyed reading this recent piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education that looked at the “ring by spring” pressures that students at some Christian colleges face to be engaged by graduation. I looked into factors affecting marriage rates across colleges in a blog post earlier this year and found a nearly six percentage point increase in marriage rates at religiously-affiliated colleges between ages 23 and 25 relative to public institutions, as shown in the figure below.
As a data person—and someone who married his college sweetheart only three years after graduation—I wanted to share a dataset that I had already compiled for that piece so people can look through to their heart’s content. It contains data on 820 public and private nonprofit four-year colleges from the Equality of Opportunity Project, with marriage rates for cohorts ages 23-25 and 32-34 in 2014. The three colleges featured in the Chronicle piece all have higher-than-average marriage rates by age 25, with Cedarville University having a 41% marriage rate, Houghton College having a 34% marriage rate, and Baylor University having a 18% marriage rate.
You can download the dataset here, and have fun exploring the data!
A special thanks to Carol Meinhart for catching a silly error in an earlier version of the dataset, where the two marriage rate column headings were switched. It has since been fixed.
Robert Kelchen 
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