How Education Is Reshaping Marriage Patterns Across Modern Societies

Over the past half century, rising college attendance and a historic reversal in the gender gap in education have profoundly reshaped how couples form in Western societies. New research examining the United States and France suggests that the broad expansion of education itself may be just as important for marriage patterns as the fact that women now increasingly surpass men in university completion.

For much of the twentieth century, it was common for husbands to have more formal education than their wives, a pattern sociologists refer to as hypergamy. The reverse pattern, in which women have more education than their male partners, is known as hypogamy, while couples with similar educational attainment are described as homogamous.

Education And Inequality In Couples

How people pair according to education has implications far beyond individual relationships because it can either reinforce or soften economic inequality across society. When highly educated and high-earning individuals primarily partner with one another, the financial divide between affluent and less affluent households tends to widen over time.

Beginning in the late twentieth century, many Western countries experienced two major transformations simultaneously. First, access to secondary and higher education expanded dramatically across the population. Second, women began overtaking men in university completion rates, fundamentally changing the educational makeup of the dating and marriage market.

Testing A Popular Explanation

Earlier demographic research often suggested that the rise of hypogamous couples and the decline of hypergamous marriages were driven mainly by women’s educational advancement. Sociologists Julia Leesch and Jan Skopek sought to examine whether these shifts could instead be explained more broadly by overall educational expansion affecting both men and women.

To investigate this question, the researchers compared two countries with markedly different educational systems. The United States adopted mass secondary education relatively early through a decentralized and demand-driven model, whereas France expanded its more centralized and stratified system later, particularly after the Second World War.

The researchers analyzed data spanning from 1960 to 2015 in the United States and from 1962 to 2011 in France. Their focus was on partnered women aged 25 to 34, an age range likely to capture individuals in first long-term unions. Education was grouped into three broad categories: lower secondary or less, completed secondary education, and completed university education.

The Counterfactual Approach

To separate the effects of changing gender balances from the broader rise in educational attainment, the authors used a statistical method known as counterfactual decomposition. This technique relies on controlled “what if” scenarios to estimate how marriage patterns might have evolved if some variables had remained stable while others changed.

For instance, one model preserved the educational relationship between men and women observed in the 1960s while allowing overall education levels to rise historically. Comparing these hypothetical scenarios with real-world outcomes enabled the researchers to estimate how much of the shift resulted from overall educational expansion versus women’s educational gains specifically.

United States Trends In Matching

In the United States, approximately 62 percent of young women in 1960 had partners with the same level of education. By 2000, homogamy had increased to roughly 71 percent before stabilizing, reflecting a growing tendency for people to form relationships with partners whose educational backgrounds resembled their own.

This rise was driven in large part by changes in the educational distribution between men and women, as well as evolving preferences regarding partner selection. At the same time, the overall expansion of education produced balancing effects across different educational groups.

As fewer people remained limited to basic secondary education, relationships between two low-educated individuals became less common. However, this decline was offset by a substantial increase in unions between two highly educated individuals, reshaping the composition of homogamous couples across social classes.

A Different Path In France

France followed a more complex pattern. The proportion of couples with matching education levels formed a U-shaped trend, initially declining before later rising again as higher education became more widespread.

During the earlier stages of educational expansion, the decline in partnerships between two low-educated individuals was not immediately compensated by a rise in unions between university graduates. Only by the 1990s did highly educated couples become common enough to drive overall homogamy rates upward again.

The researchers found that this U-shaped pattern in France was influenced more strongly by the timing and structure of educational expansion than by the reversal of the gender gap alone. France’s later transition to mass higher education produced a delayed but ultimately significant increase in pairings among graduates.

Hypergamy, Hypogamy, And Gender Reversal

When the researchers examined couples with unequal educational attainment, additional nuances emerged. In the United States, the proportion of women who were more educated than their partners declined until the 1980s before rising steadily in subsequent decades, reflecting the increasing number of female university graduates entering the partnership market.

At the same time, the proportion of women with less education than their husbands began falling significantly from the 1970s onward. In both the United States and France, this contributed to a clear decline in traditional hypergamy as fewer women partnered “upward” educationally.

The reversal of the educational gender gap directly reduced the pool of highly educated men available to less-educated women. However, the researchers’ simulations suggest that the overall expansion of education acted as a partially counterbalancing force, particularly regarding hypogamy.

In a hypothetical scenario where education levels rose but women never overtook men educationally, the models suggested that hypogamy would likely have declined structurally. The broad increase in educational attainment alone would still have reduced the relative share of women more educated than their partners.

Robustness Checks And Limitations

To test the reliability of their findings, Leesch and Skopek conducted several robustness checks. These included expanding the assumed dating pool to include men up to age 39, reflecting wider age gaps between partners, and introducing a more detailed four-level education scale.

These alternative models did not substantially alter the main conclusions. Both educational expansion and the changing gender balance appear to play distinct and sometimes opposing roles in reshaping marriage and partnership patterns.

The authors also acknowledged several limitations. Their models assume partner selection within relatively narrow age ranges, while in reality people may increasingly form relationships across broader age groups when preferred partners are scarce within their own cohort.

In addition, rising delays in marriage and cohabitation may push many first long-term unions beyond the 25-to-34 age range used in the analysis. As social norms surrounding commitment and partnership timing continue to evolve, this could affect how representative the findings are of modern relationship patterns overall.

Broader Social And Economic Context

The researchers emphasize that structural changes in education do not operate independently from wider cultural and economic forces. Shifting gender expectations, wage inequality, labor market changes, and corporate concentration all influence how people evaluate potential partners and weigh education against other traits.

The rise of online dating has also dramatically expanded the social and geographical scope of partner selection, potentially weakening the influence of local school systems and neighborhood-based social networks. These digital changes may interact with educational assortative mating in ways researchers are only beginning to understand.

International migration introduces another layer of complexity by altering the composition of national partnership markets through the arrival of people with different educational profiles and cultural backgrounds. Untangling these migratory effects from domestic educational trends remains an important challenge for future research.

Although counterfactual simulations are hypothetical by design, they offer researchers a clearer window into the underlying mechanisms shaping modern couple formation. The study, titled “Five decades of marital sorting in France and the United States – The role of educational expansion and the changing gender imbalance in education,” highlights how deeply educational opportunities and policy structures shape intimate relationships.

Taken together, the findings suggest that policymakers concerned about social and economic inequality should pay attention not only to access to higher education, but also to how educational expansion influences partner selection and household formation. As growing numbers of young adults enter the dating market with similar educational credentials, the quiet mathematics of education continues reshaping the institution of marriage itself.

Article prepared by Victoria Caldwell.