Reassessing Delayed and Forgone Marriage in the United States

Demographic projections from standard nuptiality models suggest that four-year college graduates are becoming more likely to marry than other women, and that the proportion of all U.S. women ever marrying may be stabilizing after decades of decline. To test these findings, I develop a new projection technique that predicts the proportion of women marrying by age 45 under flexible assumptions about trends in age-specific marriage rates and effects of unmeasured heterogeneity. Results from the 1996 and 2001 Surveys of Income and Program Participation suggest that the “crossover” in marriage by educational attainment is weaker and taking longer than previously predicted. Instead, the strongest educational divergence with respect to delayed marriage involves childbearing; among all women who delay marriage, college-educated women are the only group becoming more likely to have a child after (and not before) marriage. Also, while these results suggest some stabilization from previous declines in the proportion of all women who ever marry, recent trends are still broadly consistent with an ongoing slow decline in marriage.