Over the past fifty years, a surge in college attendance and a shift in the gender balance of graduates have altered the educational makeup of romantic couples. An analysis published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility reveals that the overall growth in education levels holds just as much sway over marriage patterns as the fact that women now outpace men in higher education.
For decades, societal norms and structural barriers resulted in partner matching where husbands often had more formal schooling than their wives. Sociologists refer to this dynamic as hypergamy. The opposite scenario, where a wife has more formal education than her husband, is known as hypogamy. When partners share the same level of educational attainment, the relationship is described as homogamous.
Demographic shifts in marital sorting carry real-world consequences for nations. The ways in which partners match up can heavily influence a society’s total economic inequality. When highly educated, high-earning individuals strictly marry each other, household wealth gaps between different social classes naturally tend to widen.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the educational landscape transformed dramatically in many Western nations. The total number of people attending university expanded globally. At the same time, the traditional gender divide reversed. Women began completing university degrees at higher rates than men, fundamentally shifting the pool of candidates available for young adults looking for partners.
Previous demographic research suggested that this reversing gender gap was the primary reason behind a reported rise in hypogamous relationships and a distinct drop in hypergamous ones. Julia Leesch of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and Jan Skopek of Trinity College Dublin designed a study to test this narrative. They wanted to separate the individual effects of the reversing gender gap from the effects of general educational expansion.
To provide a comprehensive comparison, the researchers analyzed data from two countries with vastly different public schooling histories. In the United States, a decentralized, demand-driven system led to a massive expansion of secondary education early in the twentieth century. France relies on a formally stratified and highly centralized educational structure. Mass education expanded broadly across the French population much later, primarily after the Second World War.
The researchers analyzed census and survey records spanning from 1962 to 2011 for France and from 1960 to 2015 for the United States. They focused their analysis on the demographic group of partnered women aged 25 to 34. This specific age range was selected to capture statistical trends in first-time unions. The team divided educational attainment into three straightforward categories for comparison: lower secondary schooling or less, complete secondary schooling, and complete university education.
To disentangle the overlapping trends of expanding degree programs and a changing gender balance, the researchers used a statistical approach called counterfactual decomposition. This analytical tool relies on mathematical “what-if” scenarios. Leesch and Skopek computed hypothetical marriage outcomes by holding certain variables rigidly constant while mathematically letting others alter over time.
For example, their models estimated what marriage patterns would look like if the statistical association between gender and education had remained frozen in the 1960s, but general educational attainment still increased. This method allowed the authors to isolate how much of a shift in romantic partnerships was linked to the sheer volume of college degrees versus the specific influx of female graduates.
The study highlighted several distinct dynamics between the two countries. In the United States, about 62 percent of young women possessed the exact same educational level as their partners in 1960. By the year 2000, this rate of homogamy had grown to nearly 71 percent, stabilizing in the following years.
This American trend was driven heavily by changes in the association between gender and education, alongside shifts in how people deliberately matched with available candidates. The structural expansion of education actually created a canceling effect in the background. As fewer Americans stopped their schooling at a basic secondary level, unions between two less-educated individuals dropped heavily. This mathematical decline was offset perfectly by a proportional rise in unions between two highly educated individuals.
France exhibited a different statistical pattern for couples with matching education levels. The rate of homogamous unions in France showed a U-shaped trend over the fifty-year observation window. It dipped initially in the late twentieth century before steadily rising again in later decades.
The researchers found that the general expansion of education in France acted as the primary driver of this U-shaped curve. A steep initial decline in marriages between two individuals with low education outnumbered the slow early growth in marriages between college graduates. By the 1990s, the surging number of highly educated couples finally overtook the losses at the lower end, pulling the aggregate rate back up.
When looking closely at relationships with unequal education levels, the researchers observed further nuances. In the United States, the proportion of women who were more educated than their partners followed an inverted trajectory. This rate dipped until the 1980s before climbing again toward the present day. At the same time, the percentage of women with less education than their partners started falling markedly after the 1970s.
In both surveyed countries, the reversal of the gender gap directly contributed to the overall decline of hypergamy. Less-educated women became less likely to partner with more-educated men simply because of the altering availability of such candidates. However, the simulation models revealed that generalized educational expansion acted as a competing force against these trends.
According to the calculated estimations, if overall educational attainment had increased in the United States without any historic changes to the gender balance, the country would have actually seen a structural decline in hypogamy. The sheer volume of available degrees mathematically pulled the trend downward. The specific increase in female graduates simultaneously pulled it upward. These two divergent demographic currents frequently functioned in total opposition.
To ensure the reliability of these numbers, the demographic team ran several sensitivity analyses. They expanded the simulated dating pool to include men up to age 39, aiming to account for larger relationship age gaps. They also tested a more granular, four-tier classification system for formal degrees. In every alternative test, the primary conclusions remained statistically unchanged.
The authors noted that shifting structural opportunities in the dating market do not operate in a social vacuum. Changing cultural preferences, shifts in gender pay disparities, and expanding corporate inequality also play a combined role in how modern couples select each other. Factors like the modern rise of online dating have drastically changed how strangers interact, altering the geographic bounds of the typical partner market.
While the utilized models accounted for existing assortative mating patterns, ordinary people continually adapt their behavior as the immediate dating pool transforms. One limitation of the research framework involves the basic assumption that individuals continuously search for partners within a relatively narrow age bracket.
If a person finds a sudden shortage of potential spouses with matching schooling backgrounds, they might permanently expand their search criteria to older or younger demographics. Future demographic studies will need to map precisely how adults creatively adjust their search parameters across different generations in response to shifting candidate pools.
Additionally, individuals might choose to postpone moving in together or marrying entirely until they find an ideal match. Since this published study solely looked at a specific snapshot of women, a widespread delay in union formation could eventually shift the apparent metrics of married couples outside of the analyzed age window. Researchers noted that changes in international migration also influence the pool of local singles.
Separating the influences of degree expansion from the shifting gender gap remains a theoretical social exercise, as both historical events occurred in tandem. Still, the statistical tools deployed in this analysis offer an objective window to decode the foundational mathematics operating behind modern romantic partnerships. The study, “Five decades of marital sorting in France and the United States – The role of educational expansion and the changing gender imbalance in education,” was authored by Julia Leesch and Jan Skopek.
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