The quote so good we can feature it again!

Type-A-Plus Students Chafe at Grade Deflation

“The nightmare scenario, if you will, is that you apply with a 3.5 from Princeton and someone just as smart as you applies with a 3.8 from Yale,” said Daniel E. Rauch, a senior from Millburn, N.J.

Enrollment data from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League#Members

The Total as % column represents the percentage of all Ivy League students that are enrolled that that particular institution, and the Rescaled ngram frequency column represents the percentage of all NYT Ivy League wedding announcement mentions since 2010.

For example, 19.2% of all Ivy League students are enrolled at Columbia, and 23.3% of the NYT Ivy mentions were of Columbia, so the difference is 4.1%

It’s worth noting that Brown is also a fairly common surname, and there’s no easy way to separate mentions of the name from mentions of the University, so Brown’s true rescaled ngram frequency is probably be a bit lower…

A few examples:

• http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/nyregion/raj-rajaratnams-trial-captivates-south-asians.html

• http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/04/21/raj-rajaratnam-trial-spotlights-wall-streets-growing-south-asian-elite.html

Census Profile: New York City’s Indian American Population

Note that we have to include both “3d” and “III” because the Times used to use “3d” and switched to “III” at some point. Wedding Crunchers allows you to use the “+” symbol to combine series—see here for an example (you can also use “/” to calculate ratios)

Rap Genius user wubwubwub adds:

Anecdotally, I think that suffixed naming is also fairly common among African-Americans. This proxy may be understating the true decline in WASP prevalence on the NYT weddings page, because African-Americans (who have probably become increasingly prevalent on the NYT weddings page) are being grouped into the WASP category. It may explain why the decline in suffixed names appears to be less stark than the decline in the other WASP proxies.

Amanda Rabinovitch, Joshua Corzine:

The bride’s father is an owner of the Cheyenne Capital Corporation, a venture capital firm in Los Altos and Newport Beach, Calif.

The bridegroom’s father, a Democrat, is a senator from New Jersey and a former co-chief executive of Goldman Sachs, the New York investment bank.

An elusively sourced Michael Jordan quote

I was disappointed to learn that this well-known and seemingly perfect MJ quote might not be authentic.

Almost as disappointed as when I found out that Frank Dux made up most of the story behind Bloodsport

As a somewhat technical aside, note that the Times used to refer to the groom as the “bridegroom”, but they have since switched to using the word “groom”.

Wedding Crunchers lets you adjust for these changes in language by summing series, so if we want to measure data specific to grooms, we need to remember to sum results for both “groom” and “bridegroom”

IN FACT THERE HAVE BEEN! Here are a few:

• The Disestablishment of Marriage

• Late Marriage and Its Consequences

Now, if only the Times could tell us the ages of the people who emailed those articles, and the ages of the people who received the emails, that would be pretty juicy (if unethical…)