Monday, August 19, 2002

A story published today by USA Today reports that putting off marriage in order to pursue higher education doesn't seem to hurt a woman's chances of marriage these days, researchers say. In fact, a marriage in which the wife has a college degree may be more stable than others.

A marriage forecast based on 1990's Census data suggests that, while more-educated women were less likely to marry a half-century ago, modern-day college grads are more likely to marry than their less-educated peers.

"The marriage market is changing," says sociologist Joshua Goldstein of Princeton University, who co-authored the forecast.

The report, noted in a recent American Sociological Association journal, says that about 90% of all women born in 1950 eventually married, regardless of their education. But for women born in 1960, a split has emerged where about 94% of female college graduates marry, compared with 89% of those women with less education.

In 1986, a study of earlier Census data found that more-educated women faced longer marriage odds, Goldstein notes. Researchers have shown numerous benefits to society from marriage, ranging from better health to reduced welfare costs.

"Marriage is becoming a luxury good," says sociologist Frank Furstenberg of the University of Pennsylvania. Rising expectations of partners and living standards over the past 50 years have shifted a heavier burden onto the institution of marriage, he says.

His research suggests that marriage partners with more education are better able to pay for services, such as child care, that ease some of the strain on marriage.

There is no doubt that marriage rates have remained high for college graduates while falling for other groups, says social policy expert Christopher Jencks of Harvard. But he is more cautious about the trend. "They are perfectly reasonable projections," he says, but projections of this kind are notoriously unreliable.