Is There a Shidduch Crisis?

Using demographic tools to understand demographic problems

Photo by Yohann LIBOT on Unsplash

To offer a quick answer to the question in the title: as long as any one individual isn’t married, there’s a crisis.

But let me rephrase the question: Is there a statistically-significant number of older singles whose suffering is caused by an identifiable systemic imbalance within the Jewish community? I’m not sure. But, because strong answers can lead to solutions, I’m sure we’d all like to find out.

Despite some energetic individual efforts, no one I’m aware of has any reliable, population-level numbers on this topic. This article is a record of my recent attempt to better understand some basic demographics of at least Toronto’s frum community and what they might indirectly teach us about the state of the shidduch market in general.

While the research I’ve done so far has produced some fascinating - and surprising - insights, unfortunately, it hasn’t delivered any clear answers. But I feel that it does do a good job showing the kinds of things we could do with more and better data.

The Shidduch Age Gap

I’m going to frame this article around the popular age gap theory. Here’s how that goes: Because the frum community’s birth rate is so high, a particular age cohort will be larger than a peer age cohort that’s even two or three years older. Because, in the yeshiva world, boys tend to begin looking for shidduchim a few years later than girls (23-24 vs 19-20), there will naturally be fewer boys available in the age bracket where girls are typically looking. The obvious solution is to reduce or eliminate the age gap by convincing boys (along with their families and rebbaim) to begin dating earlier.

However, it would be helpful if we could confirm the facts on the ground before planning responses. Are we sure, for instance, that there actually are more girls “on the market” than boys? Would our response change if it turned out that there were, more or less, as many unmarried older boys as girls? And what about trends: are things getting better or worse?

Even if we can confirm that there are more unmarried single girls than boys, we would need to control for all associated variables before concluding that the age gap is the primary cause. Is it not also possible, for instance, that there are fewer boys who have made certain specific lifestyle choices (kollel, frumkeit levels, etc.) than girls and that’s why girls are having a hard time?

Finally, before pushing for change through social engineering efforts (like convincing boys to marry younger), we must first be sure that unintended consequences won’t end up making things worse. How to we know, for instance, that younger boys are emotionally ready for marriage? In the larger Western world in recent years - especially post COVID - there have been measurable delays in young people adopting “adult” behavior patterns (like learning to drive and getting jobs). We can’t assume that our communities are unaffected.

Smart decisions require clarity about the facts on the ground. So let’s look for some facts.

The Data

Enrollment in frum elementary and high schools is an excellent proxy for frum populations. Sure, not every family has children enrolled at any give time, but the school-age population is large enough that it should show us important trends and patterns.

For this study, I used Province of Ontario per-school enrollment data covering the school years 2014-15 to 2019-20 for these schools:

Girls Elementary:

• Bais Bracha Elementary School

• Bnos Chaya (“replaced” Bais Bracha after 2016)

• Bais Yaakov Elementary School

Boys Elementary:

• The Toronto Cheder

• Yeshiva Yesodei Hatorah

• Yeshiva Bnei Zion of Toronto

Schools with boys and girls branches:

• Or Haemet Sephardic School

• Eitz Chaim Schools

Girls high school:

• Beth Jacob Private School

• Bnos Bais Yaakov High School

• Tiferes Bais Yaakov High School

Boys high school:

• Ner Israel Yeshiva

• Yeshiva Darchei Torah Private High School

• Yeshiva Gedolah of Toronto

• Yeshivas Nachalas ZVI

I excluded a few Mizrachi-oriented schools, not because they’re not important, but because their communities face different pressures and are, for our purposes, not particularly analogous.

I couldn’t find official data for one boys school and data covering a year or two for another school was missing , so I’ll work those numbers into my analysis later. I also “ignored” a number of smaller boys high schools because of their low numbers.

Finally, I’m aware that some graduates of the elementary schools covered by our data will go on to attend one of the local Mizrachi high schools. That too, since it will impact our output, will have to be accommodated later.

The Results

As you can see from the following table, the total number of students enrolled in the schools in our study has been around 4,000 for each of our six focus-years. The Growth column shows how much change occurred (as a percentage) within that population from one year to the next.

The average annual growth over that period was around half of one percent. For a population this size, that would predict that the class of, say, 2019-2020 would have 80 more members than the class of 2015-2016. Is that enough to produce an age-gap effect? It’s certainly possible.

To be more confident, of course, we’d need to know more about larger population patterns within the city. In other words:

• Are more families moving into Toronto each year than moving out?

• Is the overall population getting older or younger?

To properly compare our elementary and high school numbers, we’ll need to divide them by the number of grades each school provides. Over the six years we’re looking at, that’ll give us an average of 322 children per grade in our elementary schools, and only 182 per grade in high school.

That was unexpected. What’s happening to those other 140 elementary school graduates who, each year, fail to show up for any high school?

Let’s break those numbers down by gender. There were certainly more girls in each high school grade than boys (107 vs. 75), but both of those numbers are far lower than the number of either boys or girls in each elementary grade, which was around 166 boys and 155 girls.

It’s a shame that I don’t yet have access to grade-by-grade data from the Province of Ontario. But the numbers we do have still suggest that, each year, there are 48 girls and 91 boys graduating grade eight who do not enter a Toronto high school the following year.

Understanding the Results

So this is the time when we mess around with the numbers.

We know that around 50 of those 91 “missing” boys do actually enroll in one of the local high schools that, as I mentioned earlier, weren’t covered by the data we used. Similarly, it’s likely that 20 (or so) boys and another 20 (or so) girls enroll in one of the two Mizrachi high schools.

That’ll drop the number of missing students to around 28 girls and 21 boys.

Each year a relatively large number of Toronto boys do leave town for high school, which could get us pretty close to making up the difference. Do that many Toronto girls also opt for out of town high schools each year? I don’t know. But it’s the most likely scenario I can think of.

One more thing. I’m sure you noticed the differences between girls and boys in elementary and high school numbers in the earlier table. There were, on average, 29% more girls in each high school grade than boys. But, oddly, 7% more boys for each elementary school grade. With populations this large (remember: we’re working with a dataset covering 4,000 people), the disparities should have been far smaller.

For context, there will normally be more boys than girls in any population. The Toronto District School Board, for instance, reported 2% more boys than girls in its 2021-2022 grade three classes, 2.2% more boys in grade six, and 2.8% more boys in grade nine. But 7% is strange. And what could explain that flip to more girls in high school?

So our data is clearly not perfect. Perhaps you can help me fill in the gaps. But it does represent at least one “data point” that should be valuable in our larger search. Finding other datasets that cover the same - or overlapping - populations, but from different perspectives, can get us further along.

What kind of data could be interesting to us? Schools, shuls, and Jewish community telephone directories are possibilities. Online surveys that attract many hundreds of responses can also provide value.

My hope is that this could inspire people from Toronto and other communities to search for new and better sources of data. Together, perhaps, we can learn more and then make a real difference.