Trends in the Gender Education Gap in Marriage and Marital Dissolution

Christine R. Schwartz, University of Wisconsin at Madison
Hongyun Han, University of Wisconsin at Madison

In contrast to the traditional pattern in which men marry women with less education than themselves, today, when one partner has more education than the other in the U.S., it is likely to be the wife. Previous research has found that couples in which wives’ education exceeds their husbands’ are more likely to divorce. Nevertheless, we might expect the negative effects of wives’ higher education on marital stability to decline as these relationships become more common. The goals of this study are to (a) describe the changing characteristics of marriages in which wives “marry down” and (b) investigate the changing relationship between spouses’ relative educational attainment and marital dissolution.