Good News On The Marriage Front
New York Times – How many American marriages end in divorce? One in two, if you believe the statistic endlessly repeated in media reports, academic papers and campaign speeches.
The figure is based on a simple – and flawed – calculation: the annual marriage rate per 1,000 people compared with the annual divorce rate. In 2003, for example, the most recent year for which data is available, there were 7.5 marriages per 1,000 people and 3.8 divorces, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.
But researchers say that this is misleading because the people who are divorcing in any given year are not the same as those who are marrying, and that the statistic is virtually useless in understanding divorce rates. In fact, they say, studies find that the divorce rate in the United States has never reached one in every two marriages, and new research suggests that, with rates now declining, it probably never will.
The method preferred by social scientists in determining the divorce rate is to calculate how many people who have ever married subsequently divorced. Counted that way, the rate has never exceeded about 41 percent, researchers say. Although sharply rising rates in the 1970s led some to project that the number would keep increasing, the rate has instead begun to inch downward.
“At this point, unless there’s some kind of turnaround, I wouldn’t expect any cohort to reach 50 percent, since none already has,” said Dr. Rose M. Kreider, a demographer in the Fertility and Family Statistics Branch of the Census Bureau.
“Families with highly educated mothers and families with less educated mothers are clearly moving in opposite directions,” Martin wrote in a paper that has not yet been published.
As the overall divorce rates shot up from the early 1960s through the late 1970s, Martin found, the divorce rate for women with college degrees and those without moved in lockstep, with graduates consistently having about one-third to one-fourth the divorce rate of nongraduates.
But since 1980, the two groups have taken diverging paths. Women without an undergraduate degree have remained at about the same rate, their risk of divorce or separation within the first 10 years of marriage hovering at around 35 percent. But for college graduates, the divorce rate in the first 10 years of marriage has plummeted to just over 16 percent of those married between 1990 and 1994 from 27 percent of those married between 1975 and 1979.
About 60 percent of all marriages that eventually end in divorce do so within the first 10 years, researchers say. If that continues to hold true, the divorce rate for college graduates who married between 1990 and 1994 would end up at only about 25 percent, compared to well over 50 percent for those without a college degree.
“It’s a big ‘wow’ sort of story,” Martin said. “I’ve been looking for two years at other data sets to see if it’s wrong, but it really looks like it’s happening.”
I never realized that a college degree was such a statistically significant indicator as to how well a marriage will hold up. But the overall numbers going down steadily for a few years now is absolutely stellar. I’m very glad to hear it.
Any input on why college degrees play such a large role?
