Saturday, March 04, 2006

Saving a culture from the Boomers

No, not suicide bombers....but the cultural terrorists known as the Baby Boomers. OK, a little over the top, but Maggie Gallagher has some good news on a return to cultural sanity.
True or False: College students today are more likely to approve of casual, uncommitted sex than college students 20 years ago. False. Between 1980 and 2000, the proportion of students in the UCLA College Freshmen survey who agreed that "if two people really like each other, it's all right for them to have sex even if they have known each other for only a very short time" dropped from 48 percent to 42 percent.

True or False: Marriages are much more likely to end in divorce today than they were 20 years ago. False. The overall divorce rate peaked around 1980 and appears to have declined modestly since then. Divorce rates per 1,000 marriages were 22.6 in 1980, 20.9 in 1990, and 18.8 in 2000(latest data: 2004: 17.7). (National Marriage Project, State of Our Unions, 2005.) According to a recent study divorce rates among the college-educated have fallen the most dramatically since the 1970s, while rates among less-educated Americans may have risen slightly. Between the early '70s and the early '90s the proportion of women with college diplomas whose marriages dissolved in the first ten years plummeted from 24.3 percent to 16.7 percent. Divorce rates among those with less than a college degree, meanwhile, increased slightly from 33.7 percent to 35.7 percent.
There is more there good and bad. Check it out.

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