The Marriage Gap
April 21, 2010
RECENT FERTILITY statistics show something that has been widely noted for years: Women with lower educational and income levels are much more likely to have children out of wedlock and to enter into a life of single motherhood. They are also much more likely to get divorced. Fifty years ago, college-educated women were slightly less likely to be married than their less educated counterparts, and the majority of women at all education levels exhibited the maturity to enter into and maintain marriages early in adulthood. The difference today in marriage rates among the classes is often known as the “Marriage Gap,” a subject which author Kay Hymowitz and others have explored.
According to the American Community Survey of 2008, 47 percent of women with only a high school diploma who gave birth in 2008 were unmarried. By contrast, just under ten percent of the college-educated who gave birth were not married, and six percent of those with a graduate or professional degree. These differences are striking. The lower the income and education level, the dramatically higher the rate of single motherhood.
Nevertheless, the ten percent unmarried rate for college-educated women is significantly higher than it was a few years ago. Among black women, more than 40 percent of college-educated women under the age of 30 who gave birth in 2008 were unmarried. In all the different categories, the more elite segments showed faster growth rates in unmarried motherhood during the 2005 to 2008 period, according to figures provided by the American Comunity Survey. The bachelor’s and advanced/professional degree categories showed growth rates of 9 percent or 10 percent while the high school dropout category grew at about five percent a year. Also, the 200 percent of poverty level and above category grew 9 percent or 10 percent a year while the poverty category grew at about 6 percent a year. Consistently, the status levels that were higher showed faster growth in their out-of-wedlock ratios than the lower status categories during the 2005 to 2008 period.
There is no level of society that is not experiencing significant family breakdown. Hymowitz and others have argued that, given their bourgeois ambitions for higher education, nice homes and well-paying jobs, marriage is safe as an institution among the well off. But these growth rates in out-of-wedlock births, the low fertility level of married women, and their significant divorce rate (still lower than that among the less educated) create a depressing picture of marriage among the affluent and well-educated too.
Jesse Powell writes:
Kay Hymowitz discusses this idea of a two-tiered society in her book, Marriage and Caste in America. She writes:
“We are now a nation of separate and unequal families, not only living separate and unequal lives but, more worrisome, destined for separate and unequal futures.” (page 16)
“But around 1980 the family forming habits of college grads and uneducated women went their separate ways.” (page 19)
“Yes, experts predict that about 40 to 50 percent of marriages will break up. But most of those divorces will involve women who have always shopped at Wal-Mart. ‘The rise in single parent families is concentrated among blacks and among the less educated,’ summarize Ellwood and Jencks. ‘It hardly occured at all among women with a college degree.'” (p. 21)
A similar theme is echoed in the Robert Rector column highlighted recently in “The Illegitimacy Catastrophe” thread. In that article Robert Rector states:
“America is rapidly becoming a two-caste society, with marriage and education at the dividing line. Children born to married couples with a college education are mostly in the top half of the population; children born to single mothers with high-school degrees or less are mostly in the bottom half.”
I have seen this theme echoed quite a lot by social conservatives, this idea that the college-educated upper class is safe from family breakdown while the lower class is entering into a family destroying death spiral.
In my view, it is not that the upper class is safe with their families intact while the lower class has lost the ethic of marriage first before children and are paying the price. What is really going on is that both the upper and lower class are losing their commitment and ability to maintain the marriage ethic at about the same rate, the upper class simply started the process of family breakdown with a higher degree of protection that they haven’t lost yet. The mistake that Kay Hymowitz is making when she talks about the out-of-wedlock ratio among less educated women rising much faster than among college graduates since 1980 is that she is looking at the increase in out-of-wedlock births in absolute terms, not in relative terms.
I’ll illustrate the point with some numbers below. Let’s say at year 0, say in 1970 this was approximately the case, that 10% of women who were high school graduates had their children out-of-wedlock and 1% of college graduates did. Let us say that proportionately the out-of-wedlock rate rises for both groups at the same rate, let’s say at 7% a year. This is what happens to the proportions of both groups over time.
Year College Grad. High School Grad.
0 1% 10%
10 1.9% 17.9%
20 3.8% 30.1%
30 7.1% 45.8%
40 13.1% 62.5%
50 22.9% 76.6%
60 36.9% 86.6%
70 53.5% 92.7%
80 69.4% 96.1%
90 81.7% 98.0%
100 89.8% 99.0%
Now in this hypothetical year 0 is about equivalent to 1970 and year 40 is about equivalent to 2010. Actual numbers for the year 2008 from the American Community Survey give a 9.8% ratio for college graduates and a 47.2% ratio for high school graduates. In the hypothetical table above, I just assigned 1% to College Grads and 10% to High School Grads for the beginning year 0 and increased their rates at 7% a year for both categories.
You’ll notice in the chart above the growth in absolute numbers in the out-of-wedlock ratio for the high school grads is much greater than for the college grads from year 10 to year 30, corresponding approximately from 1980 to 2000. In absolute terms from the chart above, the college grads go from 1.9% to 7.1%, an increase of 5.2 percentage points, while the high school grads go from 17.9% to 45.8%, an increase of 27.9 percentage points, over the same 20 year period. At this early stage of development in the growth path of both groups the rate of out-of-wedlock births is growing 5 times as fast in absolute terms among the high school group compared to the college group. Not only that but the high school group started out in worse shape than the college group. So, looking at these numbers, you can conclude not only did high school graduates start off in a worse condition but they got even worse much faster, five times as fast, as the comparable college graduate women. Wow, America must be dividing into two separate and unequal castes! The marriage “haves” and “have nots”!
In reality in the chart above the out-of-wedlock rate is growing at exactly the same rate proportionately, 7% a year, for both groups because I designed the chart that way.
Out-of-wedlock births do not grow linearly, they grow exponentially. Historically looking at the data an exponential growth curve fits the numbers much better than a linear growth curve.
In order to make the judgment that family life is holding together among college educated-women you have to look at how the daughters of women with college degrees fare in comparison to the out-of-wedlock ratios that were prevalent among the class their mothers belonged to at the time when their daughters were born.
So, take for example the group of college-educated women who gave birth to daughters in 1980. Now those daughters are 30 years old. What was the out-of-wedlock ratio for college educated women in 1975? (I’m assuming a five-year time span from the time the woman graduated from college until she had the daughter in question.) I estimate it to be 2%. Next, look at the total out-of-wedlock ratio of all the daughters born to these women when they had their children in the years approximately from 2005 until 2010, assuming most of the children born to these women are born when the mother is from 25 to 30 years old. For college-educated women, the rate is now almost 10%.
If you do the strict like-for-like comparison the proportion of out-of-wedlock births among the generation of women born to college graduate mothers in 1980 is much higher than the proportion of out-of-wedlock births their mothers faced when it was time for them to have their children. Not only will not all the daughters of college educated women graduate from college themselves, but in addition to that the proportion of college educated women having their children out-of-wedlock today is much higher than it was in 1980.
Before the college educated crowd can claim that their families are secure and stable from one generation to the next they have to pass the test of their daughters being as good at family formation as they were, and from a statistical point of view on average I believe that they fail that test miserably. Remember, growth in out-of-wedlock births is best measured in proportional terms, not in absolute terms, when trying to see how bad the problem is getting how quickly.
Laura writes:
The other significant factor with families with higher income and education is their fertility levels. The birth rate for married women fell by more than 9 percent from 1980 to 2006. Married women are obviously having much smaller families than they did 50 years ago, another indicator of overall health.
—– Comments —
Janet writes:
I was thinking about the couples among my close circles of friends and families; the black ones at least. In most cases, including my own, they are college-educated wives and husbands without college degrees. My husband, however, has quite a number of technical cerifications which are considered eqivalent to a college degree. Each of these marriages has lasted more than 10 years and are going strong, even among those who would be considered lower middle income.
The common denominator? A strong and vibrant commitment to faith. I know that your post was an analysis of raw data, but given that you are a woman of faith, I thought I should point out that even among less educated, lower income minorities, nothing is a better indicator of marital success than faith in Christ. True, genuine faith.
Just wanted to interject that. God can work wonders even among those folks who shop at Wal-mart. It is too bad that our culture has thrown out the one thing it needs most to maintain families suitable for raising the next generation.
Laura writes:
The relatively low illegitimacy rate of fifty years ago was a result not of material conditions, but of a spiritual legacy.
