I read through it (not as thoroughly as I would like), but there is something important to remember – its not the statistics that lie, its the statisticians.
For example, the study doesnt examine what percentage of boys/girls are born to Orthodox homes. What if the problem lies in the fact that our ratio is 1.10 girls to boys? In Chinese homes, where boys are more valued, they have a higher rate of boys born. Maybe we are just producing so many more girls than boys for whatever reason that there is NO WAY to keep up.
Also, the study gives a number of 6% going off the derech. That number sounds reasonable to me, and I would venture that its a ration of 5:1 boys vs girls leaving (as in my experience, boys leave the fold at a much higher rate than girls). Even with an even starting point, losing boys at a faster rate than girls means there is no way to catch up – ever.
And, this study neglects factors like people sending their kids to more religious institutions (as I’ve seen over the years). So, while a family might be on the MO side, they may not be happy with the MO school and send their kid to a slightly yeshivish school. This happened in my apartment building in Brooklyn – there were 4 people with kids looking into kindergarten. The options they were looking at were Shulamis, Prospect Park, Mesores, Lev Bais Yaakov and Bais Yaakov D’Rav Meir. The MO family wasn’t 100% happy with Shulamis because it has turned into a school mainly for the children of immigrants. They chose one of the other schools. When the other 3 families heard the kind of kid that got excepted to that school (and was going), they went to a different school. So, even though the family is not yeshivish in any way, they went to a more yeshivish school. This trend is also being seen in MO schools, where you do have a percentage of enrollment of non-religious students.
I have trouble believing that the population is growing at a rate of 3-4% a year. I understand that our generation is having more and more children, and looking over a span of 10 years you can see a difference, but 2 years? That doesn’t make mathematical sense to me.
PM, thank you for actually reading my posts! It really is appreciated 🙂
In my HS class, I would say about 80% married their spouses within a 2 year age range. Very few married anyone older than that, and it was 3-4 years if a lot. But, there were also people who married YOUNGER guys, which balanced it out.
I’ll put in another post on fertility because I am not 100% sure its YWN appropriate.