How Your College Major Can Predict Who You Will Marry

Every year, the Census Bureau polls a 1% sample of the population on a detailed set of questions that become the American Community Survey. Each response comes with a well validated weight that allows us to make amazingly precise estimates about the entire population.

The questions have great value on their own if you want to track, say, the percentage of people with college degrees or the number of people who moved in the past year. Where they have tremendous value is when you start combining them.

When tracking people who move from state to state, for example, you might combine this with education to examine where people with secondary degrees are moving compared to others–extremely useful if you’re looking at electoral trends. And because the Census Bureau surveys every member of a household, you can see how the variables play across spouses, children, and other family members under one roof.

It’s an incredibly powerful toolset, though the sample size does typically dwindle after three or more variables, particularly if one of them is geographic. That still leaves plenty of room. I’ve gone back to this well again and again, and this piece is a fun example.