Title: Marriage and divorce: patterns by gender, race, and educational attainment : Monthly Labor Review: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Headings: Marriage and divorce: patterns by gender, race, and educational attainment
Marriage and divorce: patterns by gender, race, and educational attainment
Data source
Table 1. Sample characteristics of survey respondents
Table 2. Percentage of the sample by gender, race/ethnicity, and educational attainment
Marriage outcomes through age 46
Marital history by age
Duration of marriages by age and education
Suggested citation:
Notes

Content: Marriage patterns differed markedly by age at marriage and by educational attainment. College-educated men and women married at older ages compared with their counterparts who had fewer years of schooling. About equal proportions of men and women who received a college degree married by age 46, 88 percent for men and 90 percent for women. Men and women who did not complete high school were less likely to marry than were men and women with more education. Men who earned a bachelor’s degree were more likely to marry than men with less education. The chance of a marriage ending in divorce was lower for people with more education, with over half of marriages of those who did not complete high school having ended in divorce compared with approximately 30 percent of marriages of college graduates. In their 2007 study, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers used data from the 2001 Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to examine marriage and divorce patterns up to age 45 for cohorts born in 1940–1945 and 1950–1955. 3 A comparison of the two cohorts shows that the likelihood of marriage declined, the average age at first marriage increased by 1 year, and married couples were more likely to divorce in the latter cohort. Stevenson and Wolfers found stark differences in marriage patterns between racial groups and between education groups for the 1950–1955 birth cohort: Blacks married later and at lower rates compared with Whites.