The Marriage (Class) Gap

Around the time I graduated from college, a bunch of my friends got engaged or married. As I learned how to navigate gift registries and brushed up on my wedding etiquette, I also pondered the cynical question: Who would get divorced?

I knew the statistics: 40% of first marriages end in divorce. I didn't intend to get divorced, but it seemed likely that at least a few of the friends who were happily planning weddings would end up separated.

A decade out of college, none of us is yet divorced (and I hope that trend continues). An article in today's Washington Post suggests a contributing factor: our level of education. According to the article, "College-educated women, whose numbers have risen sharply since 1980, often live with a partner and postpone marriage. But in most cases, they eventually marry and have children, and divorce at about half the rate of women who do not finish high school." The divorce rate may be 40% for the population as a whole, but my college friends and I are more educated than the population as a whole. The article continues, "As marriage with children becomes an exception rather than the norm, social scientists say it is also becoming the self-selected province of the college-educated and the affluent."

According to the New York Times, "The emerging gulf is . . . one of class — what demographers, sociologists and those who study the often depressing statistics about the wedded state call a 'marriage gap' between the well-off and the less so." People with college degrees are more likely to get and stay married. According to the Marriage Project at Rutgers University, married people who are educated and affluent are more likely to report being happy in their marriages.

Marriage is often presented as a Republican, "family values" issue--but most of my college friends are Democrats. (An interesting note, though: according to an article in USA Today that ran before last year's elections, "married people are the core of the Republican base" and "Republicans control 49 of the 50 districts with the highest rates of married people.") Republicans are apt to frame the marriage gap as a question of family values (and the need to "promote marriage"); Democrats are more likely to frame it as an issue of income inequality. At the moment, there is a chicken-and-egg element to the argument; marriage leads to the accumulation of wealth, and the accumulation of wealth makes people more likely to marry.

Much more information about the state of American Marriage can be found on the National Marriage Project's web site, where I spent a good part of my afternoon sidetracked by topics such as 10 Important Research Findings on Marriage, the Top 10 Myths of Marriage, and the Top 10 Myths of Divorce.