Executive Summary: “Reassessing Delayed and Forgone Marriage in the United States” by Steve P. Martin

Besides higher incomes and better employment, one of the many benefits conferred by a college degree was marriage.  Recent studies have reported that women with a degree from a four-year college are poised to overtake others to the altar.  The good news for less educated marriage hopefuls was that declining marriage rates showed signs of stabilizing.

           In this paper, Steve Martin tests these assumptions about highly educated women and overall marriage rates because this past research predicted women’s behavior before they were finished their marrying years.  Additionally, where other analysts assumed most women would marry by their mid-twenties, Martin expands his base data to include those women marrying by age 45, organized according to race and education levels.

            His main datasets are the 1996 and 2001 Surveys of Income and Program Participation, which offers full marital histories for women and men.  He culls data on women born in the U.S. between 1945-1974 for a final sample including 31,798 women.  In addition, Martin measures the number of delayed marriages (marriages that take place past one’s late twenties) as well as whether these unions came after a non-marital birth.  He also checks to see if a delayed marriage is followed by a birth ten years after the marriage.

            Among Martin’s most compelling results is that educated women do not have as significant an advantage in their chances of marriage.  Rather, their advantage lies in the likelihood of having a child after marriage and not before, if the marriage is delayed.   Less educated women are more likely to bring a premarital birth into a delayed marriage and Martin’s data suggests that this gap will grow over time.  Overall Martin concurs that there is some stabilization in marriage rates, except among less educated women, who will continue to experience a slow decline.