College, it turns out, is a great place to get married. There is a high correlation between spouses’ degree of educational attainment, a pattern of pairing usually called “educational homogamy.” Research from Denmark and Norway suggests that this pairing is driven both by sorting—similar people both go to college and get married to each other—and also by colleges reducing the “search frictions” of pairing.
Colleges, in other words, both make it easier for those people to pair off, and serve as a signal that another person is a potential spouse. But which schools actually have the most married grads? And which ones do the worst?
To answer these questions, I use data published by Opportunity Insights, the Harvard-based research group which investigates “barriers to economic opportunity.” In particular, the group obtained information on essentially every U.S. tax filer born between 1980 and 1991, including the college many of them attended. OI published a summarized subset of this data, including information on nearly 2,200 schools. Included therein, in addition to a host of statistics used below, is a measure of the share of the school’s graduates a) born between 1980 and 1982, who were b) married as of 2014. (This statistic is hereafter called a school’s “married share.”)
Continue reading the entire piece here at Institute for Family Studies
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Charles Fain Lehman is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Follow him on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in Institute for Family Studies