How many Oxbridge Graduates are alive?
A strange question, but one to which I might need the answer for another post. An estimate will do, so the idea here is to start with the undergraduates it churns out each year, and work backwards assuming that more and more are dead, the longer ago they graduated. I am going to assume that none are alive over the age of 100, which is probably wrong, but it's not going to be the most important error here.All the figures come from here, which is slightly out of date, but they don't seem to have changed much in the last few years so I'm reasonably relaxed about it.
In 2004 there were 3,300 newly graduated Oxonians, whereas in 1951 there was 1,704, 1961 2,271, 1971 2,610, 1981 2,990, 1991 3,139 and 2001 3,284. For 1941 and 1931 I'm going to make the heroic assumption that it was 1000 and 700 respectively. The war will have had an impact, but I'm going to ignore it.
Anyway extrapolating between these dates, I get a total of 179,000 Oxford graduates since 1928. Now we need to know how many are dead. I thought of doing a survey of those who respond to the Magdalen College record, but I decided it might not be represenative. So I took actuary tables for 1980 (the earliest I could find) and adjusted them downwards a bit to reflect less healthy societies (not too much, I guess Oxford graduates probably live longer than average).
We shouldn't pay too much attention to specific data, as it is going to be very inaccurate, but it tells me that there are 2 over the age of 100, and 380 of the 1945 crop. In total there are still 138,000 alive.
Phew! That's Oxford. Let's double it for Cambridge, as it's always been a sijmilar size. That makes 276,000. What about post-graduates? Are they Oxfbridge graduates? I suppose so. Many of course also were undergraduates, and the growth has been mostly in the last 30 years. So I would (again rather heroically) suggest they might amount to another 10-15%, making around 305-315,000.
Labels: Pointless statistical stuff
posted by Matthew @ 3/19/2007 06:05:00 PM
Comments: 4
