Survey: 1. Who Are We?

ByThomas Guterbock

[This is the first in a series of monthly reports of results from the Class of 1969 Reunion Survey, conducted last Spring with the assistance of the UVA Center for Survey Research.]

The first section of the survey asked general information (geography, our major at Yale, etc.) and specifically asked about our marriages, children and grandchildren.   Approximately 700 people took the survey, although not everyone answered all the questions.

The respondents seem to be nicely representative of the whole class, first because the sample size is so large and second because geographic distribution is nearly identical with our AYA addresses-on-file, and participation by college is very close to actual numbers by college:

 

To protect anonymity, our survey asked only for the first digit of each classmate’s ZIP code.  Those numbers matched up well to the geography of the full class roster.  If you want to see where everyone in the class lives, check out a cool, interactive map at Where We Live.

Marriage

Mixers, dixers, coeducation, road-trips … let’s face it, a major part of our life in those years involved a search not only for self, but for a mate.  As a group, we seem to have done slightly better than other people our age, with almost 60% of us married only once.  Behold the final numbers:

Children

As a class (that is projecting out from the responding classmates to include everyone in our class), we’ve had:

  • 1,749 children
  • 468 stepchildren
  • 1,888 grandchildren
  • 511 step-grandchildren
  • 121 great-grandchildren
  • 95 step-great-grandchildren. . . Total offspring as of Spring 2018: 4,832

Note that with 1,748 children from 1,054 members of the class, we are not achieving replacement rates … which is about 2.1 children per couple.

With a few outliers who had children before graduation (and one lucky soul whose first child arrived in 2006!), the majority of our first born children arrived in the ’70s.  (Can anyone explain why 1981 was such a banner year for our first-born babies?)

 

Of those who have had children, most had fathered their first child by 1991.  As seen in the following graph, only a few of us were still having children after the turn of the millennium. And if you wonder whether “legacy” matters in admissions, take note that 100 Classmates have had at least one of their children go to Yale (undergrad or grad):

Grandchildren

We have a few more grandchildren than children … but none in Yale yet:

Who Took The Survey?

Here is the distribution of respondents based on public vs. private school, and by Major.  You’ll see it’s quite representative of the class as a whole:

Coming Next: 2.  Sex and Health

Next month, we’ll compile and report on all those questions about our health, including obesity, serious illness, prosthetics, smoking, toking and sexual activity. Stay tuned!

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