There is a growing trend in the United States towards assortative mating — a clunky phrase that refers to people's tendency to choose spouses with similar educational attainment. Rising numbers of college-educated women play a key role in this change. It is much easier for college graduates to find and marry each other when there are more equal numbers of each gender within an educational bracket.
A media storm erupted in the Spring of 2013 when a Princeton alum, Susan A. Patton, president of the class of '77, offered the following advice to female students: "Here's what nobody is telling you: Find a husband on campus before you graduate." Writing in The Daily Princetonian, Patton went on: "You will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men who are worthy of you."
Patton was dubbed a busybody, an elitist, and an anti-feminist. But while the idea of finding a spouse during college was outdated, her basic advice to marry a man "worthy of you" seems to be one most college graduate women were already heeding.
One implication of assortative mating is greater household income inequality, since education is a strong — and strengthening — predictor of earnings. Households with two college graduates multiply that earnings power by two and are doing much better than households with less-educated couples. Jeremy Greenwood of the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues estimate that assortative mating pushes up the Gini coefficient (a measure of income inequality) from 0.34 to 0.43. Work by Brookings' Gary Burtless suggests that between 10 percent and 16 percent of income inequality in the United States is caused by the "growing correlation of earned incomes received by husbands and wives."
Assortative mating may also have an impact on intergenerational mobility, since it widens the gap in resources available in different households. Families with two college graduates will have more money to invest in their children and may be able to afford private K-12 schools or homes in top-notch school districts. They are also more likely to have jobs offering greater flexibility, allowing them to better balance work and family life. At the other end of the spectrum, less-educated couples or single parents are more likely to face insecure working conditions, lower pay, and limited access to high-quality schools.
Race is a factor in patterns of assortative mating. Black women face more difficult "marriage markets" than white women, given current rates of intermarriage according to work from University of Maryland sociologist Philip N. Cohen. Black women have the lowest rates of "marrying out" across race lines, in part because of racist attitudes to inter-marriage. Just 49 percent of college-educated black women marry a well-educated man (i.e., with at least some post-secondary education), compared to 84 percent of college-educated white women, according to an analysis of PSID data by Yale sociologist Vida Maralani.
In this Long Memo, we examine race gaps in marriage patterns in terms of educational sorting, using 5-year estimates from the 2008-2012 waves of the American Community Survey. We focus in particular on college graduates.
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