--- title: College Majors: How They Predict Who You Will Marry description: As the school year gets underway, we got to wondering: Which degrees are most romantically compatible with one another? Here's the answer canonical: https://time.com/4497291/college-degree-major-love-marriage/ author: Chris Wilson article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-09-19T14:11:29.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-04-13T08:57:45.951Z og:title: How Your College Major Predicts Who You Will Marry og:description: Music majors are 22 times more likely to marry another music major og:url: https://time.com/4497291/college-degree-major-love-marriage/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: How Your College Major Predicts Who You Will Marry twitter:description: Music majors are 22 times more likely to marry another music major twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # How Your College Major Can Predict Who You Will Marry > Sponsored content. 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Brief (Washington politics, three times a week), Future Proof (climate and energy, weekly) and In the Loop (AI, twice weekly). All are free at time.com/newsletters and together reach more than 1.1 million engaged readers. #### Which TIME newsletter should I subscribe to? It depends on what you follow. For a daily briefing, The Brief. For health, Health Matters. For Washington politics, D.C. Brief. For AI and technology, In the Loop. For climate and energy as a business story, Future Proof. For culture recommendations, Worth Your Time. For how TIME's journalism gets made, Inside TIME. Readers can select any combination at time.com/newsletters. #### Are TIME's newsletters free? Yes. All seven TIME newsletters are free to join at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and provides full access to TIME's journalism at time.com/subscribe-agent. #### Who writes TIME's newsletters? TIME journalists write them. Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement.  by [Chris Wilson](https://time.com/author/chris-wilson/)  ## Chris Wilson Sep 19, 2016 2:11 PM UTC  by [Chris Wilson](https://time.com/author/chris-wilson/)  ## Chris Wilson Sep 19, 2016 2:11 PM UTC As the school year gets underway and millions of matriculating students [consider which major to choose](http://time.com/money/4166000/college-earnings-potential/), we got to wondering: Which degrees are most romantically compatible with one another? Are an anthropologist and an art historian intrinsically more likely to get together than, say, and [English major](http://time.com/3964415/ceo-degree-liberal-arts/) and a physicist? Now, we have the data to answer that question. By studying Census records representing 76,472,310 married couples who both have bachelor’s degrees, we were able to see which pairs of degrees were more or less likely to end up together. Just enter a major below and we’ll show you which [other fields of study](http://time.com/4106297/college-degrees-parents-house/) are most compatible. In almost every case, like attracted like. Music majors, for example, are 22 times more likely to marry a fellow musician than the population at large with bachelor’s degrees. The award for most compatible majors goes to Performing Arts majors, who are 38 times more likely to marry one another, followed by Law majors (33 times more likely) and the above-mentioned music majors. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Business majors–the second most popular major, after Education–are only 1.7 times more likely to walk down the aisle together, followed by Family Studies majors (also 1.7) and Engineers (1.8). Generally speaking, degrees in related fields tended to be more compatible. Someone with a history degree is more compatible than average with an art historian, English major or someone with a degree in foreign languages. But there are some surprises. Computer scientists are more compatible with undergraduates who majored in law than they are with those who studied math or statistics, in defiance of the assumption that all math-and-science types stick together. Likewise, physicists are particularly compatible with language majors (which is great news for the field of [natural language processing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural%5Flanguage%5Fprocessing)). None of this means that degree-pairing is necessarily the [cause of these couples’ compatibility](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation%5Fdoes%5Fnot%5Fimply%5Fcausation). In all likelihood, people with the same or similar degrees are more likely to find themselves in the same vicinity. Still, if you’re, say, an architect looking for love, you might want to consider hanging around your local art gallery. After fellow architects, you’re most likely to marry someone with a degree in Fine Arts. **Methodology**Data was gathered from [IPUMS](https://www.ipums.org/) for the years 2009-2014\. To produce these results, we calculated which majors a person with a given degree was more or less likely than average to marry. We did that by comparing the popularity of a given pairing of two degrees to the overall popularity of each of the degrees separately. The data is gender-agnostic; in all cases, couples are represented twice in the data, once with each partner as the spouse. We simplified the degree definitions from IPUMS slightly for legibility. The record of those modifications is available [here](https://github.com/TimeMagazine/marriage%5Fby%5Fdegrees/blob/master/canonical.csv). In the interest of transparency, TIME Labs has open-sourced the complete code used to conduct this analysis, [available on our GitHub page](https://github.com/TimeMagazine/marriage%5Fby%5Fdegrees). Source: IPUMS-USA, University of Minnesota, [www.ipums.org](http://www.ipums.org). _Design by Lon Tweeten._ ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4497291/college-degree-major-love-marriage/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4497291/college-degree-major-love-marriage/"},"headline":"How Your College Major Can Predict Who You Will Marry","datePublished":"2016-09-19T14:11:29.000Z","dateModified":"2026-04-13T08:57:45.951Z","description":"Music majors are 22 times more likely to marry another music major","url":"https://time.com/4497291/college-degree-major-love-marriage/","keywords":["Living","Marriage","relationships"],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Chris Wilson","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/chris-wilson/"}],"articleSection":"","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-living/","name":"Living"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/4497291/college-degree-major-love-marriage/","name":"How Your College Major Can Predict Who You Will Marry"}}]}] ```