And now I will give a second installment. Again, this is only for those who are not unwilling to listen.
Argument #2 of the rapidly increasing population:
There are more classes per grade in the younger ages than older
Not surprisingly on this, AZ again claims there is “a school study done by the Avi Chai foundation of all Jewish Schools in North America proved this without a shadow of a doubt”.
To me this study is apocryphal. I have only heard of it from people who claim it as gospel to back their theory. No one else ever mentions it. So I decided to do a little reseach before replying, using my good friend (and alter ego) Google. Oddly enough, the entire avichai website does not contain a report of this study as he reported. The closest thing I did find, however, was a sentence in the “Brandeis study”, which I quote:
Some 170,000 students are in first through 12th grades in day schools throughout the country, an 11 percent increase from a decade ago, and increasingly these students come from non-Orthodox homes
If this is not the “study” that everyone is referring to, please let me know. Then please let me know why, if this study really happened, it is not posted on their website.
However, if that sentence is the source of the “study” claimed by backers of this theory, it has to be one of the most grossly out-of-context misquotes I have ever heard. The article only mentions this in passing, and the crux of the article is entirely unrelated to this issue. The article claims that the source of the increase is due to the quality of day schools, and does not make any mention of or connection to population growth. Again, if there is some other dedicated article, please point me to it. And also explain to me how an 11% increase in 10 years is impressive.
Now that we have the “study” out of the way, let’s look at the claim:
Are there more 12th grade classes than 9th grade classes? I’m not going to claim inside knowledge of Jewish schools that I do not have, but I did ask this question to administrators in a few different Jewish communities. I got different responses from different areas. Some communities are growing because they have more and more young families settling in. So every year there is an increased parent base, causing an increased student base. Another administrator told me that the school is shrinking and that they find it harder to recruit students each year. One other administrator told me that they have shrunk the class sizes and that there are more classes in general than 5 years ago, but no difference between older and younger grades. There seems to be a different answer for every administrator I asked.
There is no question about it, the frum Jewish population is growing (B”H). But at what rate? I doubt it is significant enough to make a huge gap in 3 years, but feelings are not a way to prove things. Studies of school classes also do not prove the point (even if such studies exist) because they do not take in to account the type of children in the school class. What percentage of day school children are relevant to the shidduch dating group? There is too much irrelevant information in the study to be useful.
Please note, I have not given any reason why the theory is wrong YET. I have only attempted to remove the support beams. Modeling a sample population will show one way or another. Up until now I have just shown that you cannot come up with logical arguments to prove your way.