A NEW report, “When Marriages Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America,” by the National Marriage Project has received widespread publicity in the news. The basic finding of the report is that marriage is deteriorating in the moderately-educated middle class. Among the college educated, the report states, family life is fairly stable and healthy. I recommend Jesse Powell’s interesting analysis of these findings in this thread.

There are several important factors to keep in mind that suggest the nation’s elite are not as conservative or stable as the report suggests:

• Many of those in the middle class who would have remained in the moderately-educated category in the recent past are now in the highly-educated category. The number of those earning college degrees has grown dramatically. To compare the highly-educated now with the highly-educated of three or four decades ago is to compare two entirely different groups. If one defines middle class as those without college degrees then the definition of what is middle class has changed dramatically.

• Those in the “highly-educated category” are seeing higher rates of cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbearing.

• The fertility rate of those in the highly-educated group is significantly lower than that in the other categories. The supposedly robust family life in the highly-educated category is not creating replacement-rate levels of fertility.

• If education is determinative in familiy stability then the highly-educated do not pass on family stability to children who do not or cannot perform at the same level in the educational meritocracy.

In the previous thread, Jesse Powell writes:

I think the fundamental mistake being made in this analysis is that education level is acting as an indicator of success and competence, it does not consist of a “class” that is homogenous and able to perpetuate itself. The “When Marriage Disappears” report gives the impression that there is a class out there called “the college educated” and that they have all these advantages that keep their families intact. Implicitly, it seems to me, there is the assumption that this “class” will pass on its advantages to its children and therefore will be able to sustain itself indefinitely as perhaps an island of privilege impervious to the wreckage being visited upon unfortunate others.

The problem is, the college educated are not an island separated from the rest of society; the “highly educated” consist of many people who were born to less educated parents and many children who were born to highly educated parents fall out of the highly educated group by not achieving the level of education their parents achieved; there are many entrances into and exits out of the “college educated” group. Not only is the college educated population fluid and interactive with the other classes of society but the size of the college educated population itself changes; it has grown greatly during the past 20 years. It is this interactive and changeable nature of the college educated population that has led to the apparent family stability of the “highly educated” class.

Basically, it is my view that family formation competence has been shifted or transferred from the “least educated” and “moderately educated” groups to the “highly educated” group and that this is why the “highly educated” have fared so well in terms of family stability. All of the different social classes are undergoing deterioration in their abilities to maintain healthy family life but the more competent elements of the less educated classes have moved up the education hierarchy and therefore have transferred their family forming competencies away from the less educated groups and towards the more educated groups.

                                                                           — Comments —

A reader writes:

I may be mis-reading this, but are the authors of this study actually implying that today’s college grads are even a fraction as well-educated as those from 30 years ago?

Personally, from direct observation of recent college grads and, say, my college degree-lacking, Baby Boomer, immediate family (I myself am in the middle of Gex X), I’d go so far as to say that today’s college grads probably are not as well-educated as yesteryear’s high school grads. In fact, a more accurate description would be “better indoctrinated” (in PoMo) than better educated, which is why we find ourselves in the bind we are in today.

Laura writes:

This study uses the term “educated” to mean those who have earned degrees. Today’s college graduates are in many cases less well-educated, in the conventional meaning of the word, than high school graduates of, say, 60 years ago.

Grateful Reader writes:

One hundred years ago, few Americans received even a high-school education. By looking at the course of study in most American high schools at that time, we notice standards in academics and morality. The literary canon was vastly Christian. The moral standards required of the students were similarly high. Sixty years ago, this was true of a college education. Today, those with doctoral degrees are often less literate than those who received eighth-grade educations one hundred years ago. One need only compare early twenty-first century professional research papers, newspaper articles, and letters to friends with those of the early twentieth century to observe what the lack of high standards, or any standards at all, has wreaked on our society. 

In his latest Brussels Journal article, Thomas Bertonneau refers to Petronius Arbiter’s Satyricon – written in AD 60 – when he writes “Encolpius observes that pandering to students will create cohorts of self-satisfied ignoramuses who will degrade the professions that they later enter. “Once the rules go,” Encolpius says, “eloquence loses vigor and voice,” … Rhetoric lying at the heart of ancient education, its degradation bodes ill for social conditions generally.”

Beautiful writing, beautiful speech, and beautiful thinking are no longer emphasized by most teachers or administrators in American public education at any level. We should not expect family stability, or any stability at all from those so ill educated. It may be that although we have more people and more colleges than we did one hundred years ago, America has fewer highly-educated people than we once had.

Stephanie Murgas writes:

I was moved by Grateful Reader’s comment that beautiful speech, writing and thinking are not valued. I believe this is because right now, the human race has reached a point where all of our information has overwhelmed us, and we (in general) lack discernment over any given object of “beauty.” I think mastering discernment requires skills like having an overall goal and a good deal of citing and editing sources (and re-editing, in many cases, which brings up the subject of apologetics). Furthermore, it requires living sacrifices in order to literally “keep on living.” To me this implies a culling effect, with an eventual effect being to remove useless branches of society or to sift through discarded material in search of lost treasure. In what place can a person find his or her “object” of beauty? The answer of course, is anywhere and everywhere, but it all depends on what the overall goal of society is. I would hope it is to produce children who can live in a better world than we currently do. So what is the best arena for the willing participants who would claim to uphold beauteous… anything? I would say it is marriage and the home, in my home, just like in the world, no subject is off-limits. 

To me, nothing is more beautiful than “something” that can take even the most macabre adult subjects, and “magically” make them suitable for young audiences and innocent senses. But business and commerce would seem to benefit as well, for if they are able to outdistance competitors in production of those objects with all the beautiful attributes we have imagined, then they (and we) would literally be able to reap material rewards out of our efforts. So I would venture to say that education, since it has no ultimate use in directly making money, is an institution like any other that is government-designed. Marriage, on the other hand, while government would like to claim it as an institution, would really find a better partner in capitalism, because there are endless ways to exploit it once a happy home and family life can be proven to be the aspired standard. Who could be happier than a housewife given the gift of spending her days supporting those companies who declare her marriage bed to be found in perfect measurements for producing the most desired of all her human desires…to produce children worthy of living in the land in which they dwell, in the time their existence is truly needed, to be found in the exact image of their mother and father?

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