How many make it to Blackbelt level?

What's the percentage of people who begin in the martial arts that get a black belt?

Quora answer by Randall Brad

The answer to your question is probably much different today than it was when I first started, but there used to be an old saying around the martial arts community that I think was quite true.

If one hundred people start in martial arts today, half of them will drop out in the first week (50 left). Half of the remaining will drop out before three months (25 left) and half of the rest before six months (12 left). Half of them will be gone before one year (6 left) and half of them will quit training before 1st degree (3 left). At best three will get to black belt and of those two will quit before 2nd degree.

Black belts and upper ranks are much easier to get than they once were and the ratio may be higher or lower … but the simple reality is that few are destined to become a true black belt. And those of you that know what it means to wear one …. will know the truth of what I say.

Quora answer by Drew Boucher

As others have said, this is a really tough one to answer. In our school it’s very, very few. In the 17 years I’ve been at this Goju school only 5 people have earned black belt.

Maybe one in 10 who start will stay past 2 months. Maybe 1 in ten of those will stay past 2 years. We loose other, dedicated students for various life reasons after that. We had one guy who was all gung-ho, with other martial arts experience quit after 1 class.

The classes are more mentally challenging than physically challenging, though they are that too. Not everyone has the mentality to do things the “old way”.

Our black belt scale is also very different from many other places. Our mid level blue belts can out fight and have better technical knowledge than any TKD black belt in our area. Our advanced students spend more time as brown belts than all the other ranks combined and this is were we start developing some of the deeper kinesthetic skills.

For us it takes between 10 to 15 years to earn a black belt. It’s slow, but that’s the way we do it. It has value to those who are willing to learn and see.

Our experience with 40 years of Wing Chun

From our experience of 40 years of teaching Wing Chun, maybe 40 people attained a level where they could have taught Wing Chun. But the number of people who actually continued with Wing Chun is about 5 people. (Ray, Reza, Sean, Gerald, Herman, Charles)

Internet Result

I just read a statistic that there are about 40,000 martial arts instructors in the USA and a total population of martial artists of about 4,000,000. That means about 1 out of 1000 make it to instructor level.