Starting college is one of the most stressful transitions in a young person’s life. Living on your own, taking difficult classes, and entering a new social scene. Amongst all, what’s the one thing at the forefront of every college freshman’s mind? Marriage, obviously marriage.
Just kidding, if you’re the average freshly graduated 18-year-old, you probably aren’t concerned about tying your life to someone else’s just yet. However, that’s not the case for some universities across the country. Marriage Pact is a data-driven matchmaking algorithm that pairs students with their most compatible counterparts on campus. The idea is that this person is your “backup plan.” It works just like in the movies: pick a specific date or age, and if neither of you is married by then, BOOM, you have each other.
The system started as an economics project at Stanford University by students Liam McGregor and Sophia Sterling-Angus in 2017. After the go-ahead from his professor, McGregor asked 100 volunteers to complete the survey that would lead to their matches. Instead, he got 1,000. And then another 1,000 the day after that. By the end of the week, almost 60% of the Stanford campus had signed up to meet their match. The program quickly spread to other campuses, but the survey changes depending on location.
The match you receive depends on the answers you give to the 50-question survey about your core values. However, each campus’s survey is different, depending on the beliefs of its students. For example, many of Georgetown University’s questions include political ideologies, whereas Notre Dame’s survey includes questions on personal morals.
The concept seems flawless, but we can’t forget that college students are inherently not flawless. Many people get ghosted by their match, and most don’t even reach out in the first place. Only 30% of matches meet up in person, and around 10% date for a year or longer. Now I’m no math whiz, but 10% doesn’t seem like a very high success rate to me. However, when we compare that to the 2% success rate that apps like Tinder and Hinge have, the odds seem pretty favorable.
The University of North Carolina didn’t have very much to say about their matches, but they did dive deep into the data that was revealed after the matches were sent out. The Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s student newspaper, claimed that the Marriage Pact “does more than just match people with potential partners; it allows students to see data visualizations that tell them more about the dating scene on campus.”
The Gainesville Sun wrote about how Marriage Pact reached the University of Florida campus from a team of three freshmen students and two Stanford students.
Unfortunately, the marriage mart has yet to come to UCF. But don’t worry, it’s an incredibly easy process to apply for The Marriage Pact to reach your campus. Head to the program’s website, enter the name of your accredited college, and answer a few simple questions to gauge your interest. The Marriage Pact is rapidly expanding across the country, and if you want to find your backup spouse, head over to their website and show your commitment.