Professors, is the divorce rate low among your colleagues?

Question

The divorce rate is somewhere between 70% - 40 % which averages ~ 50% overall in the United States. The ebb and flow is based on factors such as socio - economic status, age, and education. Therefore, my question is this. Given that professors tend to be on decent socio - economic status and tend to be at a mature age (late 20's early 30's) and have a solid education. Is the divorce rate RELATIVELY LOW among your colleagues?

1. Do you teach university or community college?
2. What do you teach?
3. How long have you taught?

I cannot thank you enough for your contribution.

Answer 1

Having not conducted a survey, my anecdotal recall is somewhere about 40-50% among the community college colleagues in my 27 years of teaching Geography.

When I was teaching overseas in Asia, many of my Asian students asked about the high divorce rate in the US. At the time (mid-1980s) the divorce rate in China was fairly low. It got me to thinking about the divorce rate in countries where there are greater numbers of people with higher education in contrast to those countries with lower divorce rates and with lower education level and numbers (which tended to be more traditional).

It seemed to me that in traditional societies, it was more a black and white world where the boundary for proper behavior seemed very clear. But was people tended to get more education, the black and white got pushed aside by a larger vast array of shades of gray. So while a point of law or acceptable behavior was well known, a highly educated person was better able to question the rules and to rationalize why it didn't really apply to them...or why their case didn't fit the rule.

In terms of economic wealth/well-being...I suppose no one really every gets enough money. So the more we get, the more we tend to want.

A former student of mine (whose parents were divorced) asked me an interesting question. "Why does it seem that when men have a favorite food, they can eat it day in and day out and never get bored? But when it comes to women, they never seem to be satisfied? They get a girlfriend, but they still look around for another girl. They get married, and they get bored and start to look around for a different woman?"

I didn't have a good answer for that. I surround my self with my family (all female) so never had that problem, so I suppose I got very lucky.

Hope this helps. Best wishes.

Answer 2

I'd never heard that the factors you mention had much to do with the divorce rate. Lawyers, for example, who tend to be of a similar socioeconomic status and age, and have a relatively close level of education, seem to have a higher divorce rate. The rate among my current colleagues is low - only one person in my department has been divorced, which would put the rate at much less than the national average. However, at my last job as a faculty member, it seemed that the majority of people had been divorced. They also had very negative attitudes toward women (I was the only woman in the department), which I think played a bigger role than any of the other things you mention. A lot of my professors in graduate school had been divorced, and it was a high-pressure school which may have made it hard to maintain a relationship. One of the reasons I took my current job was because I was impressed by the way my colleagues, and especially my boss, spoke about their spouses. It was obvious that they respected them.
1. I teach at a university.
2. I teach business
3. I have taught for 28 years

Answer 3

I might like to understand the percent of atheists that get married vs the percent of Christians. I'm inclined to guess the divorce cost is decrease since best essentially the most dedicated atheists get married, whilst Christians are much more likely to get married faster and extra most likely.