Marriage and divorce: patterns by gender, race, and educational attainment

Moreover, the “divorce gap” between college graduates and those with less education was larger in the NLSY79 cohort than it was for the 1950–1955 birth cohort. In the NLSY79 cohort, the divorce rate for first marriages is nearly 20 percentage points lower for those who have completed their bachelor’s degree compared with those who have completed high school, regardless of whether they have some college or not. The gap is even greater, approaching 30 percentage points, when comparing those with a college degree to those with less than a high school diploma. Just as with first marriages, college graduates were more likely to stay in a second marriage when compared with groups that have less education.

Further disaggregating the sample by both education and gender, table 4 shows notable differences between men and women who had the same level of education. Men and women with at least a bachelor’s degree are about equally likely to marry by age 46 (90 percent and 88 percent, respectively). However, at all lower levels of education, women are more likely to marry compared with men. For men, the probability of marriage increases with education. Among women, those who did not complete high school are less likely to marry compared with women of all higher education levels. However, in contrast to the situation for men, there is little difference in the propensity to marry among women with at least a high school degree. Relative to male members of their cohort who did not complete high school, men with at least a bachelor’s degree are about 11 percentage points more likely to have married by the age of 46, while female college graduates are only about 4 percentage points more likely to have married than are women who did not complete high school.

Historically, college-educated women had been less likely to marry compared with less educated women.¹⁴ However, this cohort has continued the trend in which college-educated women became at least as likely to marry as less educated women.¹⁵

At each level of educational attainment, men marry later compared with women. Although both men and women with a college education delay first marriage compared with their counterparts who have less than a high school diploma, for women the average length of the delay is 5 years, compared with almost 3 years for men.

For both men and women, the probability of divorce declines with educational attainment. The gradient, however, is steeper for men than it is for women. For men, those who married and only completed high school are 25 percentage points more likely to divorce than are their counterparts who have a college degree. In contrast, this difference is roughly half as large for women. The key to this difference is that college-educated men and women who marry divorce at different rates, with about a quarter of college-educated men divorcing compared with 35 percent of women.

Just as men with more education were more likely to get married a first time than were men with less education, men with more education were more likely to remarry after their first divorce. For women who have divorced, the propensity to remarry did not increase with education. It is also interesting to note that men with a college education were much more likely to remain in their second marriages (85 percent) relative to women with the same amount of education (65.8 percent).