Marriage Pact Campus Report reveals the year’s dating trends

Marriage Pact released its annual Stanford Campus Report on May 3, revealing data on the undergraduate population’s perspectives on dating, Stanford, politics and more.

4,177 students participated in the 2025 Stanford Marriage Pact. Founded in 2017 by Liam McGregor ’20 and Sophia Sterling-Angus ’19 as their final project for Econ 136: “Market Design,” The Marriage Pact is an algorithm that pairs undergraduate students together based on their criteria for an ideal spouse. Students answer a series of questions, from which the annual report collected its data. 

According to McGregor, 99% of seniors participate in Marriage Pact before they graduate, which is higher than the four-year graduation rate of 65.6%. 

“The first year the Marriage Pact ever happened, I remember wondering if even 15 people were gonna sign up,” McGregor said. “And I thought, if fewer than even 100 people sign up, will it even have been worth it? Because you can have the best algorithm in the world, and if nobody signs up, it doesn’t matter. Your best match out of 15 or 20 people isn’t such a good match.”

That first year, 58% of the undergraduate population signed up.

The goal of the platform is to give students someone who can be their backup spouse, if needed. 

“One day, you’ll look up from your cubicle and realize you turned 40. The Marriage Pact gives you a number you can call. We hope you don’t need it,” a statement from Marriage Pact to The Daily said. 

McGregor noted that the annual campus report, which began in 2018, has become a “fun” tradition to learn from the year’s data. 

“The algorithm holds a mirror up to us a little bit when we get our matches. And so, it’s always fun to look in that mirror a little bit and see who we really are,” he said.

McGregor said Marriage Pact chose to highlight the most unexpected and interesting statistics to include in the report, as well as fun things that “poke fun at ourselves every once in a while and our neighbors down the hall.”

This year, Marriage Pact allowed students to see their compatibility with friends and also compare their answers to the rest of the campus. According to McGregor, these new features were “for the people, for the plot.” 

The report included several statistics related to students’ majors. Math majors had the highest average response to the question “Are you smarter than most people at Stanford,” with Marriage Pact ranking science, technology and science (STS) majors as the most Machiavellian, based on their overall responses. 

This year, Marriage Pact included a new question “Is AI a net good for society?”, which McGregor said proved to be a “contentious” question. 

“I don’t want to beat a dead horse at Stanford, but it is interesting to see,” he said, referring to the new AI question. “First of all, it reveals a lot about you. I think it says a lot about your values and your worldview, your beliefs, which is important about any Marriage Pact question. But then it also… tells us something quite interesting about ourselves.” 

Each year, new questions are added and removed based on outcome data from previous years and what is important to people at a given time. 

English majors were the least likely to say that AI is a net good for society, with an average score of 2.70 out of 7, while biomedical computation and computer science majors were on the other end of the spectrum with 4.69 and 4.67, respectively. 

Marriage Pact also asked students about their political ideology, finding that 46% of students reported as Democrats and 5% reported as Republicans. Other categories include communist, socialist, liberal, apolitical, independent, libertarian and conservative. 65% of socialists reported they would not date a Republican. 35% of Republicans said they would not date a socialist.

Libertarians were the most likely to answer that they wanted to be a part of the wealthiest 1%, while conservatives were the most likely to believe they can change the world.

The final section of the report focused on students’ sexual preferences. 

Conservatives, with an average score of 4.25 out of 7, were most likely to report they liked to take control during sex, while Democrats had the lowest score at 3.49. Biomedical computation majors were more likely to lean towards waiting to have sex, with an average score of 4.38 out of 7, with 7 being “Until Marriage.” Earth systems, communication and STS majors leaned heavier towards “Zero wait,” having average scores of  3.36, 3.46 and 3.49, respectively.

Protestants leaned the most toward never bringing a hookup home to an unmade bed, with an average of 4.87 out of 7, and atheist and Buddhists leaned the most towards strongly disagreeing, with 4.35 and 4.37 points, respectively. 

Other fun statistics to note are that students without siblings agreed the most with the statement “I am the most important person in my life,” with a score of 4.52, and middle children had the lowest agreement, with a score of 3.99. 

Despite the various findings, Yoanna Hoskins ’27 challenged the report.

“I think the findings are pretty interesting and cool, but they also highlight the limitations of reducing relationships to data and algorithms,” Hoskins wrote to The Daily. “This does make me wonder how much of what actually matters in relationships can be measured in a survey format.”

Overall, McGregor is content with the way that Marriage Pact has turned out. 

“It’s an incredible tradition at this point, and I’m just amazed that it’s become what it’s become,” he said.

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