Got education? more likely to marry

From the Economist:

Data from the Census Bureau (US) show that married couples, for the first time, now make up less than half (45%) of all households.

This may seem to be bad news, but on the good news front the divorce rate has gone down with lesser marriages. This seems to imply that those who marry these days tend to stay married, or in other words, it is weeding out weak marriages.

There is more to the story, as it seems that marriage is now a privilege of the educated.

There barely was a marriage gap in 1960: only four percentage points separated the wedded ways of college and high-school graduates (76% versus 72%). The gap has since widened to 16 percentage points, according to the Pew Research Centre.

The article quotes that those without a college degree earn less and prefer to raise children out of wedlock as they cannot 'afford marriage'. I find that hard to explain. In the state of Michigan, you could walk over to the courthouse, fill out a few forms and get married for less than $30. You would probably pay more for a meal for two in the City of Ann Arbor than for getting married in court. It is perhaps understood that if that educated are more likely to get married, then they are older as well.

And as for the children born out of wedlock, the disparity is immense:

Only 6% of children born to college-educated mothers were born outside marriage, according to the National Marriage Project. That compares with 44% of babies born to mothers whose education ended with high school.

The article did not comment if those children born were out of choice. Another interesting question is: Are children better off, or rather, no worse-off in single-parent (more like single mothers) families? If there is a significant difference then the huge disparity between kids born to educated, well-off two-parent families vs. lower-educated, poorer single mother families can only get amplified in the decades to come.