Congrats, Graduates! But your degree won’t affect your dating life
Your parents may be proud, but most people don’t care if their date has a degree
Cue Vitamin C: it’s officially graduation season. What are the indicators? Cap-and-gowned teddy bears in every Hallmark, for one thing. Instagram feeds riddled with hashtags like #friends4eva and #ihaveadegreebutnojob, for another. The clearest sign, however, is that it’s what everyone is talking about. Mentions of graduation in conversations between OkCupid members increased by nearly 60% this month.
So graduation is obviously a hot topic right now. But just because people are talking about it doesn’t mean they actually care. Analyzing how OkCupid members filled-in-the-blank to “A college-level education is__,” we discovered that only 20% of daters consider the lack of a college degree a deal breaker. The majority (58%) merely deem it a perk, responding that it’s “nice, but not mandatory.” The remainder of OkCupid members either replied it was “unnecessary” or did not respond at all.
Perhaps expectedly, daters with a graduate degree are most likely to consider a B.A. mandatory in a mate, followed by those with a college-level education. But even among OkCupid members who attended grad school, only 46% of women and 35% of men said they wouldn’t date someone because he or she hadn’t gone to college.
It might surprise you, however, to know that it’s actually millennials who are the most stuck-up (or what some may simply call “discerning,” depending on where they fall) when it comes to educational pedigree. Although the odds aren’t staggering, we found that daters 18–34 are more likely to turn down a date because of his or her education level than any generation. Nearly 22% of female millennials and 16% of male millennials say a college degree is mandatory.
So everyone’s talking about graduating, and millennials are the ones who actually care if you do or not (and probably your mom, too). But what are these recent graduates actually talking about? Well, we took a look at that, too. We (anonymously) combed through the messages of over 5,000 recent grads on OkCupid and found that academics is the last thing on their brains. Instead, this is:
Recent grads are not only more likely to mention the above than any other daters, but they also mention the below significantly less:
It seems that, once you’ve achieved one milestone in life, you’re not necessarily looking to complete any others — or really search for anything long-term, for that matter. After all, recent grads did just get out of a four-year “relationship” so they’re not looking for love or a relationship. They’re just looking to hang out during their extra free time and watch Harry Potter on Netflix, mmmkay?
Written by Jane Reynolds. Illustrated by Hanna Kim. Data science by Dale Markowitz.
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