I’m asking about lower divorce rates, but people with more education tend to do better on an endless number of metrics other than the economic ones you’d expect (lower poverty, lower unemployment, less welfare, etc).
Higher education is tied to higher life expectancy, less incarceration, lower number of children, lower rates of smoking, more likely to exercise, lower disability, etc.
I’m assuming/guessing that this is because college is kind of a selection process, in the sense that the people who get into and complete college possess certain personality traits that make you successful at life in general. But I’m not sure if that is speculation or proven. Also this doesn’t account for education inflation, ie 100 years ago graduating from high school was rare, I think the rates were 25% or so. Now the rates are far higher, and the trend is likely to continue. So it isn’t just due to selecting from a small subset of the population and assuming they do better due to personality traits or a more privileged background, because education inflation is happening on a society wide scale.
Either way, the divorce rate for high school educated people is about 40%, for college educated people is 15-20%.
This is just a wild-ass guess, but most college graduates don’t start ‘real adult life’ until age 22. That means four more years to get rid of the young-and-dumb before they start thinking about someone who they want to spend the rest of their life with.
I think you can mostly count this as one of the economic outcomes you’d expect. People who go to college tend to be richer, both because college degrees lead to better jobs on average, and because richer people go to college in the first place.
Financial problems are one of the leading indicators of divorce.
Having richer (than average) parents and higher (than average) incomes won’t completely insulate you from financial problems, but it’ll sure help.
I don’t know the answer myself because my family is quite well educated but would win a gold medal in divorce if it was an Olympic sport.
However, I doubt the answer is a simple one. Some alternate ideas are:
More to lose. Getting divorced is expensive and becomes much more expensive and hard to unravel the more money and social standing you have.
Putting family and stability ahead of your own wants and needs. This is tied closely into number one and some less educated people do it too but it is a stereotypical upper-middle class trait. It is a lot harder to fund and arrange all of those prep programs and summer camps for your kids if you have a split family. It can be done because I do it easily but a lot of people think that simply isn’t the way to do it. Social respectability is a big factor for lots of people with education and means.
Selectivity of partners or choosing to have none at all. A lot of professional people don’t get married at all or they do so later in life after they are already professionally and financially stable. That is a lot different than grabbing the first good looking cashier you see at age 19 and trying to make a go of it. It may work but it is easier when the big life obstacles have already been overcome.
I personally wouldn’t look at divorce rates at all. Those just mean that both people are willing to stick with something even if it doesn’t work that well. That has never been an admirable goal in my mind but others disagree. I have been in support groups with people from all socioeconomic groups from the richest to the poorest. Once you eliminate the COPS level behavior that plagues some of the poor, the upper middle class and rich don’t seem to be very happy in their marriages in general either. You just get different versions of the same problem like upper-middle class trophy wives drinking vodka at 10 am after their child is in day-care just so that they can cope or businessmen screwing anyone in sight on business trips.
The general types of issues are the same, it is just a lot easier to wallpaper over them when you have status and money.
There’s a certain category of people who are highly dysfunctional. Such people are unlikely to hold a steady or lucrative job, and a significant subset will be unlikely to maintain any sort of long-term relationship. They’ll be either poor and single or poor and divorced.
The priest a couple of Sundays ago: “if two brothers fight, don’t ask what for… ask for how much”. He was speaking about inheritances, but I thought it was a damn good line.
Higher likelihood to marry later, when they “know who they are” a lot better; they’re a lot less likely to undergo some radical change.
Higher income. This won’t help if they have wildly differing ideas about how to spend it.
Having actively considered negative possibilities before tying the knot. From “when I’m 64” to “what if one of us is in a bad accident”.
Less likelihood of getting married because there was an “oops” (no need to involve shotguns), or because “we really really really want to have sex but we can’t until we’re married, so let’s get married”.
Some people are happy moving to having separate lives without going through the hassle of a divorce. This is a lot easier if you have a large home or multiple homes.
I’d say the obvious is that they don’t rush into marriage and are more likely to vet a potential mate, maybe for years before tying the knot. They are usually in a better place financially, and then finally married couples especially ones who are both well educated have a high tendency toward no children, and usually don’t have more than one if they have any. Finances and children are both huge strains on marriages, especially things that are unforeseen or unplanned which is less likely with married people who have higher education.
Interesting how nobody has mentioned intelligence as a reason. Obviously there is a significant correlation between education and intelligence, and intelligent people are more successful at avoiding dumb mistakes. (Although they’re certainly not completely immune.)
Dumb mistakes as in choosing the wrong partner. Also, intelligence presumably helps in making a relationship work.
My suspicion is that it’s a combination of cultural characteristics and economic stability.
For example, divorce is seen as generally an unambiguously negative thing in middle/upper-middle class settings, with the exceptions of infidelity and abuse. It’s not as overwhelmingly negative as it once was, but it’s not seen as positive, and at best is a neutral thing.
And along with that, there’s a sense that maybe it’s better to wait and get married to the right person than to get married and divorced, so people tend to wait until they’re out of college and a bit older.
There’s also a component that **Shagnasty **mentioned about putting family and stability ahead of your own wants and needs, which I think translates into a lot more work being put into maintaining and/or repairing marriages among middle-class and above. This also works in synergy with my first point as well- the social stigma of being divorced and effects on children reinforce this as well.
And finally, being more financially secure removes one major source of conflict. Most people I know who have rough marriages tend to have issues that surround things like long work hours, or lack of doing family chores/family stuff, or wanting to still be in a band and stay out late, even though they’re 39 with a day job, a wife and children. Or at worst, it’s about financial issues maintaining a certain lifestyle and affording luxuries, not having trouble paying the bills.
Note that Lumina, a Sallie Mae spinoff, is essentially in the business of encouraging people to take out student loans. I’m not saying they’re wrong, but they’re not objective.
Actually, this link is more nuanced and even more interesting than that. The data is a bit out of date, but it shows that divorce rates in couples where the woman has a college or professional degree dropped by half over the last twenty-five years, while the rate for couples where the woman does not have such a degree (even when she has some college) has mostly held steady.
So the divorce rate isn’t a question of college in general. It’s tied specifically to whether the female partner attains a degree.
Could it be something like a situation where in situations where the female partner doesn’t have a degree, the male partner holds all the cards and is prone to bailing, instead of staying to work it out, while when the female has a degree, the economic power in the relationship is more equal and the standard of living is higher, giving the men more incentive to stick it out?
I think your question is more or less answered by now, but I’d like to add that this seems to be part of a broader pattern of differences between socio-economic classes. Warning: generalization ahead!
People who are less priviliged - intellectually, financially, socially and/or culturally - are generally more in the habit of making (bad) decisions based on emotion rather than on rational weighing of the pros and cons: telling their boss in the face what an ashole he is, buying a big screen tv that they can’t really afford nor need, having unprotected sex … and yes: marying someone with whom a long term relationship will never work, cos ‘they’re so in love’ and then quickly have some kids they can’t really take care of financially nor psychologically, but nontheless tell their boss to shove it one day, have an extramarital affair (cos they cant help it)… Well, you got the picture by now, or rather: my picture.
I think it’s pretty much purely income-related. There is still a difference between college-educated people and others when it comes to income, esp if you don’t take age into account.
If you have a good income, and you are thinking about getting divorced, then it will be financially bad for both of you. Even if it’s an amicable split and you try your very best to even out the costs, two households to maintain cost more than one.
On the other hand, if you, as a couple, both work but are on a low income, or only one of you works due to young kids or disability or simple lack of work, then being married can cost you quite a lot of money. If you’re happy together you suck that up because you have all the other non-financial benefits of living as a couple, like having a hug to come home to or just liking hanging out together.
Once it becomes unhappy, the financial benefits will be more obvious for at least one side: I’m still living with this loser even though if s/he left I’d have more money. Then the partner that has more to gain from the divorce than they lose starts thinking of it more favourably even if, were the situation slightly different, they might have given it a chance, and the other partner probably doesn’t have that much to lose either compared to living in a home where they’re unwelcome and can’t pay the rent.