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Starting with couples who married in 1980, however, the slopes of the curves begin to change, with divorce rates dropping sharply for the well edu-cated while declining modestly for the rest of the population. For those who married at the end of the eighties (examined ten years later, at the end of the nineties), the divorce rates of those without college degrees change direction and rise significantly but continue to decline for the well educated. The net result: by 2004, the divorce rates of college graduates were back down to what they were in 1965—before no-fault divorce, the widespread availability of the pill and abortion, or the sex revolution.5 In the meantime, the divorce rates of the less well educated reached all-time highs. These increasing divorce rates occurred well after the legal changes in the role of fault. The change in the inci-dence of divorce thus involved two very different time periods. During the sev-enties, what we now think of as the period of the sex revolution and the seismic shift in gender roles, divorce rates rose for the country as a whole. During the nineties, a class divide appeared in family behavior. College graduates, who marry much later than those who do not attend college and who have become much more likely to marry one another, began to create much more stable fam-ilies. Class differences were remaking the family.
The Elite Commitment to Marriage and Children
Complementing the puzzle of diverging divorce rates has been the increase in non-marital births. This has been the part of the changing family that has
figure 1.1: First Marriages Ending in Divorce within 10 Years as a Percentage of All First Marriages by Female Educational AttainmentNaomi Cahn and June Carbone, Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture 40 (2010)
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C l a s s , M a r r i a g e M a r k e t s , a n d t h e N e w F o u n d a t i o n s f o r F a m i l y L i f e 17
attracted the most study and concern. The changes are striking. When the age of marriage began to rise for the college educated in the seventies, so too did the age of first birth. The result postponed family formation and lowered over-all fertility. For high school graduates, the big delay in the average age of mar-riage came later—and it came with an increase in non-marital births.6 Young women who used to get pregnant and then marry the father still get pregnant, though a little bit later than they did in the fifties or seventies. It’s just that they no longer marry the father. While the age of first birth has continued to rise for college graduates, the increases leveled off after 1990 for other women.7 The result—a steady increase in non-marital births but not for everyone. The chart in figure 1.2 shows that, in 1982, the non-marital birth rate for women with moderate education more closely resembled that of higher educated women than of women with the least education. Today, the opposite is true. College graduates continue to hold the line on non-marital births, even as that line erodes for everyone else.
The results are even more dramatic when race is taken into account. The non-marital birth rate for white college graduates has remained at 2 percent, with no change in the twenty-five-year period that started in the mid-eighties. During that period, twenty-somethings became more likely to live on their own. Journalists began to discuss the “hook-up” culture on college campuses, with casual sex becoming the norm.8 Cohabitation increased, and overall mar-riage rates dropped. The stigma against non-marital births rapidly eroded. Yet, white college graduates held the line. The delay in starting families produced a delay in births but not a lack of emphasis on marriage. Indeed, a fourteen-year-old daughter of college graduates was more likely to be raised in a two-parent home in 2006–2008 than in the early eighties; the same held true for
figure 1.2: Percentage of Births to Never Married Mothers, Ages 15–44Nat’l Marriage Project, The State of Our Unions 2010, When Marriage Disappears: The New Middle America 23 fig. 5 (W. Bradford Wilcox & Elizabeth Marquardt eds., 2010), available at http://www.virginia.edu/marriageproject/pdfs/Union_11_12_10.pdf.
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African Americans as well as whites.9 One of the things that separates couples like Tyler and Amy from Lily and Carl is that Tyler and Amy still believe that they can make marriage work and that they should wait until they have found the right partner before having a child.
For those without college degrees, in contrast, a delay in marriage has meant an increase in non-marital births—and in the number of those likely never to marry. For the most disadvantaged women, non-marital birth rates were already high in 1982, and they continued to rise. Today, for example, the non-marital birth rate for African Americans without a high school degree is 96 percent. Marriage has all but disappeared in the poorest communities. As figure 1.3 shows, the group that experienced the largest increase in the period from the mid-eighties until 2008, however, was white high school graduates—a group once among the most likely to marry. The non-marital birth rate for this group was 4 percent in 1982, just barely higher than the rate for college grads. By 2008, the rate had increased to 34 percent, close to the 42 percent rate for white high school dropouts. African-American high school graduates also became much more likely to give birth outside of marriage during the same period, with the percentage of non-marital births rising from 48 to 74 percent. Moreover, the huge recent expansion in the non-marital birth rate, which has had a dramatic impact on the middle of the American public, has largely been to women in their twenties; teen births have fallen across the board.
figure 1.3: Percentage of Births to Unmarried Women by Race, Education, and Year, Ages 15–44W. Bradford Wilcox, When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat From Marriage in Middle Amercia,” The State of Our Unions: Marriage in America 2010 (Charlottesville, Va., National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia and the Institute for American Values, 2010), 56 Figure S2, http://stateof ourunions.org/2010/SOOU2010.pdf.
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contraception and abortion influenced the age of marriage, the change in legal access to contraception provided the larger effect.
Indeed, shortly after the pill became available, women with college degrees began to delay marriage, and they did so earlier and to a greater degree than less-educated women. The chart depicted in figure 4.1 demonstrates that the big drop in early marriage came for college graduates in the seventies; a similar drop would not occur for other women until twenty years later.14
When Goldin and Katz discuss the consequences of the pill, however, marriage—and the disappearance of the shotgun wedding—is not their pri-mary focus. Instead, they talk about grad school. In the old story, women who could become pregnant needed to be shepherded into marriage. By contrast, those free to time childbearing in accordance with their career plans could take advantage of the opportunities opening up for women in the seventies. The changes were dramatic. The number of women in law school rose from 4 per-cent in the sixties to 36 percent in 1980; in medical schools, from 1 to 30 per-cent; in dental schools, from 1 to 19 percent; and in business schools, from 3 to 28 percent.15 The seventies became the “child-bust” years, with dramatic drops in overall fertility. The one thing that did not change for college graduates, however, was the strong connection between marriage and childbearing. In 1982, non-marital births constituted only 2 percent of all births to those with a bachelor’s degree. For whites, those numbers remained unchanged in 2006.16 And the “baby bust” gave way to a “baby boomlet” in the eighties.
The result transformed the career and marital prospects of college gradu-ates. In the nineteenth century, almost half of women college graduates never married.17 In 1960, 29 percent of college-educated women in their sixties had
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figure 4.1: Percentage of Women Married by Age 25Adam Isen and Betsey Stevenson, 2010. “Women’s Education and Family Behavior: Trends in Marriage, Divorce and Fertility,” NBER Chapters, in Demography and the Economy, 107–140 National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., at p. 7 in the NBER version at http://www.nber.org/papers/w15725.pdf.
T h e R e d i s c o v e r y o f M a r r i a g e M a r k e t s 41
not done so.18 Well into the eighties, high school graduates remained more likely than college graduates to marry and be married.19 Today, however, the percentages have flipped; college graduate women are now “poised to become the most likely to ever marry.”20
The secret is that as college-educated women delayed marriage, so too did the men. When we headed off to college (June in 1971, Naomi in 1975), we heard hints that we should be on the lookout for the right man while we were there. In fact, when we (and our classmates) didn’t get pregnant and didn’t press for commitment, the men in our lives didn’t marry either. Goldin and Katz comment that the pill, by encouraging the delay of marriage, created a “thicker” marriage market for career women. The difference in the age of mar-riage between men and women stayed small as the age of marriage increased.21 Instead, the big effect was to segment marriage markets by class. In the fifties and sixties, the college men who married in their early twenties often married either their high school sweethearts back home or fellow co-eds who dropped out of school after the wedding. The men in our generation who graduated from college married later and became much more likely to marry fellow grad-uates. The women who postponed marriage found that the most successful of the men were there waiting for them.
By the nineties, the remade marital terms set the stage for the divergence in the incomes of college graduates and everyone else.22 Between 1960 and 1980, the family incomes of the highly educated and the less educated rose and fell together. After 1980, the two diverged, with household incomes of the
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figure 4.2: Median Household Income by Education, 2012 dollarsSource: U.S. Census Bureau, Historical income Tables, Household Tables H-13, H-14, http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/household/ (last visited Nov. 6, 2013). Tables H-13 and H-14 are based on slightly different educational attainment questions; for example, the college category includes “Bachelor’s Degree or More” (Table H-13) in 2000 and 2012, and “College, 4 Years or More” (Table H-14) for 1974 and 1990 and Table H-13 includes a category of “High School, 1-3 years,” while Table H-14 includes a category “9th to 12th grade (no diploma).”
T h e H e a r t o f t h e M a t t e r 57
79 percent of the women with boyfriends will have had sex recently.30 On the other hand, virginity is more common when women constitute a smaller share of the student body even though, with the more favorable gender ratio, these women should have an easier time finding a compatible mate. And the women have an easier time keeping a boyfriend without having sex. As figure 5.2 shows, 56 percent of the women who have boyfriends are still virgins on a campus where women constitute only 30 percent of the student body. That number falls to 12 percent of the women with boyfriends on a campus where 70 percent of the student body is made up of women. Simply put, the price of a boyfriend rises when men are in short supply, and that price involves sex. Regnerus and Uecker conclude that “[w]hat scholars describe as the ‘hook-up culture’ may actually be a simple and passive result of this demographic trend—the growing gender imbalance on campus—rather than any active change in Western sexual culture.”31 Perhaps as critically, Regnerus and Uecker’s analysis suggests that sexual practices on college campuses may not
figure 5.1: Likelihood that a Woman with a Boyfriend Had Sex in the Past Month by Percentage of Women on Campus
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The happier news for women, however, is that these economic changes suggest that high-income women enjoy a larger number of high-income men to choose from. The most relevant figures, of course, involve single men and women, and the gender gap is smallest among the young and unattached. Nonetheless, looking at young college graduates during the prime marriage years continues to show a concentration of men in the upper ranks.
Even though women are more likely to graduate from college than men, as the chart in figure 6.2 shows, the average male graduate earns more than the average female graduate, with the greatest disparities occurring at the extreme tail of the distribution, that is, among the top earners. Women looking for re-lationships, of course, want to know about numbers of men rather than the percentages in the chart. Looking at numbers further emphasizes the way men dominate the high end of the employment market—at least among whites. Among white college grads between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four who work full-time and earn more than $100,000 per year, the men outnum-ber the women by at least 2 to 1. Between $60,000 and $99,000 per year, white men outnumber white women by a little bit less than 2 to 1. At the lower income levels, women outnumber men. Nonetheless, for all white college graduates working full-time at any income level, white men continue to outnumber the women in the twenty-five to thirty-four-year-old age range.38
These numbers are further skewed by the question of who the lower earn-ing women college graduates are. Those who herald the “end of men” empha-size the increasing numbers of women college graduates as women outnumber men on college campuses.39 Looking at broad trends on college attendance, however, the story becomes one of the intersection of gender and class. If we
figure 6.1: Female Median Income as a Percentage of Male Median Income by EducationMedian Annual Income, by Level of Education, 1990–2009, InfoPlease, http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0883617.html#ixzz1JFxpOxL9.
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look at the dependent 40 sons and daughters of the highest income families heading off to college shortly after high school graduation, there is no gender gap. For the top quarter of households by income, males make up 51 percent of the children entering college from these families. For the same income group among African Americans, the numbers fluctuate more, rising from only 41 percent male in the mid-nineties to 54 percent male in 2003–2004 and then back down to 48 percent in 2007–2008. Among whites, the biggest drop in male attendance has come from households in the bottom income quartile, and, indeed, for that group as a whole, males make up only 43 percent of the total.41 In Tyler’s and Amy’s families, there are no gender differences in who attends and finishes college. In Lily’s and Carl’s families, the women have become a better bet to finish school than the men.42 And as they get older, Lily is much more likely to go back to school than Carl.
A 2012 study suggests that this further skews marriage markets. The likeli-hood that a college graduate will marry and that he or she will marry someone with the same education turns out to vary by class. The more advantaged the college graduate, the more likely he or she is to marry and to marry a fellow college graduate.43 The women who most skew campus gender ratios are the ones returning at older ages, and they may not be looking for a spouse at all. We do not have the data to know, however, whether the age mismatch or cultural differences explain the discrepancy.
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figure 6.2: Earnings Distributions for 25- to 30-Year-Old College Graduates Working Full-Time and Year-Round in 2008Philip N. Cohen, Young, educated, and gender-gapped, Fam. Inequality Blog (July 23, 2010, 6:00 AM), http://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2010/07/23/young-educated-and-gapped.
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an overworked guidance counselor was in charge of the process for hundreds of students, many of whom she had never met.
These differences reflect the ability of the upper middle class to combine workforce participation, which increases the family’s resources, with active parenting. In 1970, of mothers with young children, 18 percent of mothers with the most education and 12 percent of mothers with the least education worked outside the home. That difference may well have accounted for the fact that high school–graduate mothers spent a few minutes more per day on their children than did college-graduate mothers. By 2000, 65 percent of the more-educated group worked outside the home, but only 30 percent of the least-ed-ucated mothers also participated in the labor market. Yet, the more-educated working mothers have increased the time they spend on their children, in part because they no longer also cook dinner, mop the floors, and do the laundry but also in part because they are older and more mature.11 As Princeton profes-sor Sara McLanahan explains,
Children who were born to mothers from the most-advantaged back-grounds are making substantial gains in resources. Relative to their counterparts 40 years ago, their mothers are more mature and more likely to be working at well-paying jobs. These children were born into stable unions and are spending more time with their fathers. In contrast, children born to mothers from the most disadvantaged
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figure 7.1: Gap in Enrichment Expenditures on Children, 1972–2006 (2008 dollars)Greg J. Duncan and Richard Murnane, eds., Whither Opportunity? Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children’s Life Chances (2011).
