Written by Flavil Yeakley
“The divorce rate among Harding graduates is higher than the national average.” This is a myth that was going around campus when I moved here in 1990, and I still hear it. The same myth is heard at other Christian colleges and universities.
A friend of mine who is a Harding graduate told me that at Homecoming he visited with alumni who had been in his club, and most of them had divorced and had left Churches of Christ. I told him that he had just joined the wrong club.
There is a natural tendency for people to notice a few dramatic cases that they have observed and then project them onto the entire population. That is what keeps this divorce myth alive. But it is a good idea to trust more objective data.
Recently I did some research for the Christian Higher Education Foundation at 11 Christian colleges and universities. More than 2,000 alumni responded to a survey. One item on that survey was marital status. Only 6.9 percent of the alumni who had ever married had divorced.
In another part of this research, church leaders reported on 5,000 church members who had graduated from high school between 1997 and 2006. Many of them had not yet married, and most of those who had married had not divorced. However, 4.2 percent had already married and divorced. The national average is that 8.1 percent of those who graduated from high school between 1997 and 2006 have already married and divorced. The divorce rate among these church members was just about half the national average.
