In a 2009 paper, sociologist George Yancey from the University of North Texas observed that prior research from the late 1980s to the early 2000s revealed that African-Americans were the least desired romantic partners compared to all other racial groups in the United States, a fact that is reflected in their relatively low interracial marriage rates. (They were also less likely to form interracial friendships than other groups.) According to data from the U.S. Census, 5.4% of all marriages in the U.S. in 2005 were between people of different races. For his research, Yancey downloaded anonymized data of almost a thousand heterosexual individuals from Yahoo! Personals. He discovered that Internet daters felt lukewarm towards racial exogamy in general. In particular, 45.8% of whites, 32.6% of blacks, 47.6% of Hispanics, and 64.4% of Asians were willing to out-date with any other racial group. Dating members of one's own racial group was the most popular option, at 98.0% for whites, 92.1% for blacks, 93.2% for Hispanics, and 92.2% for Asians. Those who were more willing to out-date than average tended to be younger men. Education was not a predictor of willingness to out-date. This means that the higher interracial marriage rates among the highly educated were due to the fact that higher education provided more opportunities to meet people of different races.