Education and marriage...linked?
Reprinted with permission from parentdish.
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Looks like the "MRS" Degree is making a comeback.
For the first time in decades, young adults with college degrees are more likely to walk down the aisle by age 30 than their peers without further education, a new Pew Research Center study reports.
This is a reversal of longtime trends, the study's experts say, as the struggling economy pushes weddings to all-time lows. As a whole, more younger adults are postponing marriage while they struggle to find work, and those lacking college degrees are seeing sharper declines in marriage.
"There's a double whammy going on for the people who aren't college-educated," Richard Fry, senior research associate at the Pew Research Center who wrote the report, tells CNN.com. "They are facing difficult employment, and they are less likely to enter into marriage and receive the economic benefits marriage provides."
Two decades ago, Fry tells CNN, those without college degrees were more likely to get married than folks with college degrees. Marriage allowed those without college degrees to offset lower salaries.
But now, according to the study, there has been a significant shift. About 62 percent of college-educated 30-year-olds are married or had been married, compared with 60 percent of those without a bachelor's degree, the study finds. A decade ago, 75 percent of young adults who didn't finish college were married, compared to 69 percent of their college-educated counterparts.
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