article_snippet: This is occurring even as in upscale America, marital bonds remain comparatively strong.
article_snippet: But drill a little deeper into the data, and a marital class divide emerges.
article_snippet: Less than half of men with high school degrees are married, compared with 76% of men with college degrees.
article_snippet: The pattern is similar among women, except that those with graduate degrees have somewhat lower marriage rates than those with four-year college degrees.
article_snippet: And because the college-educated tend to look for mates with similar education and earning power, the college-educated tend to look for mates with similar education and earning power unions push the college-educated tend to look for mates with similar education and earning power even higher up the income scale -- further widening the economic gulf between marital haves and have-nots.
article_snippet: More than 40% of children are born outside wedlock today (including nearly three-quarters of black children).
article_snippet: And a raft of social research shows that children who grow up in married, two-parent families do better in school and in life than those who don't.
article_snippet: It's true that more children are being raised by cohabiting couples, but in the United States (unlike some European countries) these relationships tend to be unstable and short-lived.
article_snippet: High marriage rates in upper middle-class America make the link between family structure and economic success abundantly clear.
article_snippet: For example, economists Robert Lerman and W. Bradford Wilcox estimate that the median income of families with children would be 44% higher today if America had the same marriage rates we had in 1980.