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Opportunities to Meet: Occupational Education and Marriage Formation in Young Adulthood

Demography

Abstract

Explanations for the positive association between education and marriage in the United States emphasize the economic and cultural attractiveness of having a college degree in the marriage market. However, educational attainment may also shape the opportunities that men and women have to meet other college-educated partners, particularly in contexts with significant educational stratification. We focus on work—and the social ties that it supports—and consider whether the educational composition of occupations is important for marriage formation during young adulthood. Employing discrete-time event-history methods using the NLSY-97, we find that occupational education is positively associated with transitioning to first marriage and with marrying a college-educated partner for women but not for men. Moreover, occupational education is positively associated with marriage over cohabitation as a first union for women. Our findings call attention to an unexplored, indirect link between education and marriage that, we argue, offers insight into why college-educated women in the United States enjoy better marriage prospects.

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Notes

  1. In the multinomial regression analysis for marriage timing by spouse’s education, we exclude 102 ever-married respondents with missing information on their spouses’ education attainments, which leaves us with 6,235 NLSY-97 respondents: 2,892 females and 3,343 males. Additionally, in the multinomial regression analysis for the competing-risk model of first union type, we further exclude respondents who had ever cohabited before age 24 or have missing data on the date of first cohabitation, which leaves us with 3,815 NLSY-97 respondents. Among them, 1,575 are female, and 2,240 are male.

  2. In the person-year data set used for estimating multinomial logistic regression models of transition to first union by union type (cohabitation or marriage), we include all person-years up to first union (either cohabitation or marriage) or last interview.

  3. The NLSY-97 asks respondents about jobs and employers during each week in the year prior to each interview, which we then aggregated to a monthly measure. Primary jobs are those in which respondents reported spending the most time being employed in a given month. In the aggregated monthly data, only a small proportion of analytic person-month data (1.48 %) reported two or more “primary” jobs (i.e., experiencing changes in employers).

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Acknowledgments

This research is based upon work supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development under Grant Nos. R21 HD068807-01 and R24 HD042849 as well as the Ruth L. Kirschstein National Research Service Award T32 HD007081-35. This article was previously presented at the 2013 annual meetings of the Population Association of America. We are grateful for helpful comments and suggestions by participants in the PAA session as well as to the Education in the Transition to Adulthood group at the University of Texas at Austin. The authors are solely responsible for any opinions or errors in the analysis.

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McClendon, D., Kuo, J.CL. & Raley, R.K. Opportunities to Meet: Occupational Education and Marriage Formation in Young Adulthood. Demography 51, 1319–1344 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-014-0313-x

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