The Old Grad

Between the shores of Maine and California live some 6,000,000 Americans who have at least one thing in common: they all went to college. How have they turned out? Is the old grad really much different from the average U.S. citizen?

This week, with the publication of a new book called They Went to College (Harcourt, Brace; $4), U.S. readers could find out. The book is the product of a five-year study, made by TIME, of 9,064 representative graduates. A Columbia University statistician, Patricia Salter West, analyzed the survey, and LIFE Editor Ernest Havemann translated the statistics into eminently readable English. The result: as complete a portrait of the Old Grad as has ever been published.

Who's Who. When TIME questioned them in 1947, the graduates had a median age of about 37, and four out of ten were women. About half grew up in towns of less than 25,000, and less than half came from "college families." The big majority of the graduates worked at least part of their way through college: only about three out of ten "never turned a hand at gainful labor until they got their degrees."

They chose a wide variety of majors. Three out of ten picked the humanities.' Then came the sciences (15%) and the social sciences (9%). The rest of the graduates were apparently preoccupied with their careers: 11% took up engineering, 9% education, 8% business administration, 3% agriculture and forestry, and so on down the line to the 1% who went in for pharmacy.

The outstanding fact of the survey is that, as a group, they have done well financially. As of 1947, the median income for all American men was $2,200, but the Old Grad was making well over twice as much. Only one in 200 was unemployed; only 16% held minor or manual jobs. The rest were in business (53%), became doctors, lawyers or dentists (16%), teachers (16%), clergymen (4%), artists or scientists (1% each). The doctors were the biggest earners: over half making more than $7,500 a year. The graduates at the bottom of the economic pyramid: teachers and preachers (median income: $3,584).

As husbands, the Old Grads have also done well. Of the 85% of the men who have married, 96% have stayed married, thus topping the 89% record for all U.S. married males by seven points. College women have not been so fortunate: 31% of them have remained unmarried as compared to only 13% of all U.S. women. It would appear, concludes the survey, that for many women college "amounts to an education for spinsterhood."