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

Many changes in the last half century have affected marriage and divorce rates. The rise of the women’s liberation movement, the advent of the sexual revolution, and an increase in women’s labor force participation altered perceptions of gender roles within marriage during the last 50 years. Cultural norms changed in ways that decreased the aversion to being single and increased the probability of cohabitation.¹ In addition, a decrease in the stigma attached to divorce and the appearance of no-fault divorce laws in many states contributed to an increase in divorce rates.²

Using the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 (NLSY79)—a survey of people born during the 1957–1964 period—this study examines the marriage and divorce patterns for a cohort of young baby boomers up to age 46. In particular, the study focuses on differences in marriage and divorce patterns by educational attainment and by age at marriage. This work is descriptive and does not attempt to explain causation or why marriage patterns differ across groups.

About 85 percent of the NLSY79 cohort married by age 46, and among those who married, a sizeable fraction, almost 30 percent, married more than once. The bulk of marriages occurred by age 28, with relatively few marriages taking place at age 35 or older. Approximately 42 percent of marriages that took place between ages 15 and 46 ended in divorce by age 46. In the NLSY79, women in this cohort were more likely to marry and to remarry than were men. In addition, marriages of women were more likely to end in divorce, as were marriages that began at younger ages. On average, women married at younger ages than men.

Marriage patterns differed markedly by age at marriage and by educational attainment.

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. College graduates and those with less education married at approximately the same rates, but college graduates married later (at age 24.9 versus age 22.8). The probability of divorce for those with a college degree was lower compared with those without a college degree. College graduates were 10 percentage points less likely to divorce.

The current study differs from Stevenson and Wolfers’ ­­2007 study in that the current study examines a younger birth cohort of Americans. This paper considers differences by gender and by racial/ethnic group but focuses on differences across education groups and by age of marriage. The trends of declining marriage rates and increasing divorce rates, shown by Stevenson and Wolfers, continue with the 1957–1964 NLSY79 cohort. The longitudinal survey shows the same patterns regarding differences between racial/ethnic groups and education groups as did the SIPP—though the NLSY79 differences between college graduates and the other education groups are even starker. While the marriage rate for the NLSY79 cohort fell to 86.8 percent compared with 89.5 percent for the 1950–1955 cohort, the rate among college graduates slipped only slightly, from 89.5 percent to 89.0 percent, between the two cohorts. In addition, though the rate of divorce rose to 44.8 percent in the NLSY79 cohort compared with 40.8 percent in the 1950–1955 cohort, the rate of divorce among college graduates fell from 34.8 percent to 29.7 percent.

Data source

The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 is particularly well suited for studying marriage and divorce patterns. The NLSY79 is a nationally representative sample of men and women who were ages 14 to 22 when they were first interviewed in 1979. Respondents were interviewed annually until 1994, and since then they have continued to be interviewed on a biennial basis. The NLSY79 collects detailed information on fertility, marital transitions, and employment in a format that allows one to determine the dating of the specific events.

Because the NLSY79 contains a longitudinal marital history for each respondent, the survey permits the study of marriage and divorce over the life cycle. For a specific cohort, the NLSY79 can provide statistics on the percentage of marriages that end in divorce. In contrast, official statistics on marriage and divorce rates from Vital Statistics Records are based on counts of marriages and divorces reported by the states from registration records. The rates are calculated by dividing the marriage and divorce totals by population estimates from the decennial census. These rates tell us what percentage of the U.S. population experiences a marriage or divorce in a given year but cannot provide information on what percentage of marriages end in divorce for the U.S. population.⁴

Because the NLSY79 collects data on many aspects of respondents’ lives—including employment, fertility, and income—many researchers have used the NLSY79 to look at marriage in conjunction with a variety of outcomes. For instance, by estimating the relationships among marriage, divorce, work effort, and wage rates, researchers found that being married and having high earnings reinforce each other over time.⁵ Others looked at the how income affects the marriage and divorce decisions of young Americans; they found that high earnings capacity increases the probability of marriage and decreases the probability of divorce for young men, but decreases the probability of marriage for young women and has no effect on the likelihood of divorce.⁶ A different study used the NLSY79 to identify causal effects of marriage and cohabitation on total family income.⁷ This study found that women who enter a cohabiting relationship gain roughly 55 percent in needs-adjusted family income, defined as income per adult equivalent, regardless of whether or not they marry; for men, the level of needs-adjusted family income does not change when they make the same transitions.⁸ In addition, a 2009 study found that marriage lowers female wages by 2 to 4 percent in the year of marriage and lowers the wage growth of men by 2 percentage points and of women by about 4 percentage points.⁹

In our research for this article, we use data collected through 2010, which is when the youngest of the sample members were age 46. At each interview, NLSY79 respondents report whether their marital status has changed since the date of their last interview. Respondents who have experienced a change in marital status are asked to list each change and report the type and date of that change.

Using these reports, NLS staff calculates start dates for the first through third marriages and end dates (if any) for the first and second marriages. In the same way, we use the respondent reports on type and date of marital change to create start and end dates for additional marriages. One issue that arises in creating a history of marital changes is the treatment of marital separations. In some instances, respondents report a separation prior to divorce. However, in other instances, respondents report a transition from marriage directly to divorce. Separations are ignored in both the creation of these variables by survey staff and our work in classifying the termination of higher order marriages. Divorce and widowhood are classified as the termination of marriage.

The sample criteria used in this study require that a sample member participated in an NLSY79 interview at age 45 or older, reported valid dates for the start and any end of all marriages, and reported his or her highest grade completed in round 9 (1988) or a later round of data collection. The most recent report of highest grade completed is used to classify respondents on the basis of educational attainment.

This study examines marriage and divorce patterns among people between the ages of 15 and 46 using a sample of 7,357 men and women who had 8,112 marriages during those ages. The data are weighted using custom weights that make the sample used in the study statistically representative of the population from which the NLSY79 was drawn.¹⁰