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Degrees and Dating

The Appeal Of Higher Education: How Your Graduate Degree Stacks Up In The Dating Game

January 18, 2015/in Date Stats /by Guest Blogger

Here at CMB, we know that our users are intelligent — you’re smart enough to have chosen us after all! Joking aside, what you may not know is that we are indeed, statistically, a favorite among highly educated professionals. Believe it or not, over 25% of our member base has a master’s degree or higher. Compare that to the national average of people with master’s degrees or higher at 12%, you guys are a bunch of smarty pants!

Naturally, we were curious to see if having a graduate degree has any correlation to a member’s attractiveness and preferences. We looked at over 20 million matches and here’s what we found. Let’s start with the dudes.

Men & Their Graduate Degrees

MA Dating

Right off the bat you’ll probably notice that for men, professional degrees (i.e., MD, MBA, JD) garner a higher percentage of likes than those with more general graduate degrees (i.e., PhD, Master’s). In fact, having a PhD or master’s seems to have no impact on men’s popularity at all! And it’s pretty clear that those professional degree holders know what’s up — they PASS on their Bagels the most frequently.

Women & Their Graduate Degrees

MA Dating

As always, men and women are as different as Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift, and our study proves no exception. Men didn’t seem too hot for the women holding professional or other higher degrees; in fact, they preferred ladies who only have their bachelor’s degree!!! So essentially ladies, all of those extra years of school you endured were totally useless as far as your dating life is concerned. The good news is, we don’t think this is a sign that men don’t find high achieving women attractive — after all, female MDs were the second most liked. My hypothesis? Maybe the issue here is more related to age. Naturally, a woman with a PhD would be significantly older than a recent undergrad graduate, and you know how men love younger women — I’m totally rolling my eyes right now.

What’s interesting is that women holding only undergrad degrees were also the pickiest, followed again by MDs. I guess popular groups just have a sixth sense about these things and know they can be picky.

How Does One’s Profile Differ by Their Degree?

Given that the type of degree someone holds has a clear impact on their attractiveness level, I was curious if there is a distinctive difference in the way people present themselves on their profiles, depending on the degree they have – i.e., are there words or phrases those with MBAs use a lot more than those with PhDs?
We loved how OkCupid conducted a similar study (but with race), so we emulated their methodology in this study. We looked at Coffee Meets Bagel users’ profiles and isolated words and phrases in their profiles that made each degree holder’s profiles statistically distinct from the other’s. The results? Alas, the differences were very noticeable. The charts below show the words people use most frequently, grouped by their degrees.
(FYI – For those of you who are not familiar with Coffee Meets Bagel, here’s an example of what a member’s profile looks like on Coffee Meets Bagel (this is mine). The words used in the last three sections of the profile are what we used for this study.)
Terrell W. Orr
MA Dating

I love how diverse the trending words for the bagels with their master’s degrees are. It just goes to show how diverse our users are, and how many topics there are to be passionate about, which makes me smile. From coding to designing to nursing, these bagels must be super creative. There are also apparently a lot of freckle-faced, curly haired master’s students. I presume that “flakey” isn’t trending because these MAs are calling themselves flakey, but probably because they don’t like flakey dates. So now you know: don’t be late for your dates of eating pies and playing cricket!

MBA Dating

Check that out: “corporate,” “start-ups,” “economist,” “counting,” “finance,” blah, blah, blah. How predictable. MBAs also love to talk about their travels and have (IMO) great taste in wine. If you’re searching for a hottie with an MBA, you might want to check out your local bocce ball and squash courts; I guess businessmen enjoy really obscure lawn games and some of the best gaming PCs.

JD Dating

The trend of alluding to your profession/degree in your profile is recurring. “Lawyer,” “law,” “justice,” “rights,” “legal,” even “oxford commas” are no surprise here. But according to our data, Lawyers are also raging meat lovers. I certainly can’t picture any lawyers I know on a trapeze or wearing jorts, but apparently that’s a thing. I’m only just a tad bit concerned about the trends of “whipping” and “bleeding.” I know lawyers can be scary, but that just brings it to a whole new level.

MD Dating

Again, all of the major trends with our doctor bagels revolve around the field of medicine, but we’re wondering if these bagels with MDs are talking about the scrubs they wear to work or the TV show. After all, it appears that these docs are quite fond of lounging around watching Glee and Aziz Ansari. I don’t blame them though, they must be exhausted when they finally do have time off; I know these things, I watch Grey’s Anatomy. But, I’m sorry, what’s with “gangsta” and “yo?”

PhD Dating

Our members who have PhDs mentioned a bunch of words relating to academics, which makes sense. I mean, if you decide to dedicate your life to studying one specific thing, it’s probably important enough to you to mention it in your dating profile, no? But these academics also have a bunch of totally random shared interests: croissants? squash? wizards?!? Also, does anyone know what the heck “flipping” is? Urban Dictionary is telling me it’s either a term related to drug use, a slang word for “doing the deed,” or the act of stealing the contents of someone’s backpack. Something tells me that’s not what these doctors of academia are talking about.

We can’t be totally sure what’s going on here, but it sure is interesting. Overall, it looks like men are into ladies with less smarts than them (frowny face), and women lust after doctors and businessmen. What are your thoughts? Leave us comments, especially if you have any idea what the heck “flipping” means.

If you liked this post, check out The Biological Reason Why He Or She Is Just Not That Into You.


About Coffee Meets Bagel (CMB): CMB  is a free dating service that helps members make meaningful connections. It’s designed for busy singles who want to find something real with little or no effort.

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Are nerds really the new cool?

Attention all nerds: Are nerds really the new cool when it comes to dating? Here is what we found.

April 4, 2014/in Date Stats /by CMB

Hi Bagels,

Ever since moving to SF, I hear this phrase a lot – “Nerds are the new cool”. Thanks to the newly minted young gazillionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Larry & Sergey, the term “nerd” really has taken on a whole new meaning. And yes, many of my girlfriends go on and on about how they find guys with thick glasses and messy hair so cute & adorable.

But is it true? I mean, sure there’s a certain appeal to the super stars like Mark but does the allure of Nerdom descend down to the rest of us common folk?

Are nerds really the new cool?

Thanks to the diversified professions represented among Coffee Meets Bagel members and our team of brilliant staticians we decided to take a crack at finding this out.  Welcome to Dating Myth #2: Are nerds really the new cool? (Dating myth #1 as you know was: Do Jewish Men Really Have A Thing for Asian Women?)

As usual, a quick refresher on how CMB works:  Every day at noon, CMB introduces members to one single (AKA a “Bagel”), whom they must LIKE or PASS within 24 hours. These Bagels are friends of friends who also meet the member’s basic match criteria – gender, age, race, religion – along with some other personal data like their job, interests, personality etc. A mutual LIKE leads to a direct connection via a private phone line and the rest is up to them.
Definition of Nerd
We took a very narrow, job-based definition of the term and so, for the purposes of this analysis: nerd = engineers & scientists (I clearly am not a nerd). We then compared how much the engineers & scientists are liked by their Bagels vs. 17 other jobs most represented on Coffee Meets Bagel.
Unfortunately, we currently don’t have enough LGBT members to compile an accurate analysis so, rather than present incomplete data we’ve once again limited this study to straight men & women. I apologize ahead of time to our LGBT members. Help us get more LGBT members by inviting your friends!
Moving on, here is what we found for both straight men & women.

Despite the alleged coolness of the 21st Century Nerd, it doesn’t look like they can compete with the old school trifecta of doctor, banker, and lawyer, which swept the top 3 in terms of most attractive jobs among Coffee Meets Bagel men (I guess we ladies are more traditional than we think!). Both scientists and engineers scored below average.
Did female nerds fare better? Not really, according to the chart below. Surprisingly, the top 3 jobs men found most attractive in women were startup (as defined as founders, entrepreneurs, business owners etc.), fashion, and consulting (I’m a startup girl but I swear I am not making this up!)

As a side note, I noticed that the one common factor among the top 3 most attractive jobs in men – doctors, bankers, and lawyers – is that they all bring in a lot of $$ vs. the top 3 most attractive jobs among women – startup, fashion, consultant – don’t (generally speaking).

I went ahead and researched the median salary of each occupation with the help of glassdoor.com and ranked each of the occupations in terms of attractiveness (% LIKED) & their median salary.

Then I mapped this out on a graph.

Check out the correlation between the median salary of each job & the % that these men were LIKED. What’s more amazing: the 3 exceptions to the rule.

Really??! The only 3 jobs that ranked higher than avg. in terms of median salary but scored below avg. in % LIKED were HR, Engineer, Scientist. Yes, the nerds…and HR (sorry guys). Is this sheer coincidence or what?
Here is what the same info looked like for the ladies.  As you can see, there’s a slight correlation but it’s much more diversified.

It’s always amazing to me to see the stereotypes you hear about gender roles and expectations in society come alive in the numbers.

Conclusion
Based on our career-centric definition it looks like nerds are still, well, nerds. Doctors, lawyers and bankers rule the day and traditional gender roles and expectations still persist, in the dating world at least.
I am guessing that when my girlfriends say they find nerdy guys cute & adorable, they were probably thinking of nerds like Matt Farrell in Die Hard or maybe Alexis Ohanian of Reddit. They still want to date a doctor, they just want him to wear nerdy glasses. Sorry Poindexters and Poindextras, it looks like you lose this round.

nerds really the new cool
Progress? Hey, it’s a start.

Dating myth #2: Are nerds really the new cool?

Final verdict: False. Quite the opposite actually.
Stay tuned for our next post! Have any dating myths you want us to bust? Let us know at [email protected]!
If you have any questions, please feel free to email our Chief Data Scientist Abe here

About Coffee Meets Bagel (CMB): CMB  is a free dating service that helps members make meaningful connections. It’s designed for busy singles who want to find something real with little or no effort.

 

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