Study Finds Higher Education Has Reshaped Marriage Patterns in the US and France

Over the past half-century, rising university attendance and a dramatic shift in the gender balance of higher education have quietly transformed how couples form across Western societies. New research suggests that these educational changes have significantly reshaped marriage and long-term partnership patterns in both the United States and France.

The study, published in Research in Social Stratification and Mobility, found that the overall expansion of education has been just as influential as the growing number of women earning university degrees. Together, these two forces have weakened the traditional pattern in which husbands were more likely than their wives to have higher levels of education.

How Education Shapes Modern Couples

Sociologists use the term hypergamy to describe unions in which the husband has a higher level of education than the wife, while hypogamy refers to the opposite arrangement, where the wife is more educated than the husband. When both partners have the same level of education, their union is described as educational homogamy, a pattern with important implications for social mobility and economic inequality.

As highly educated individuals increasingly partner with others who have similar educational backgrounds, household income disparities often widen. This phenomenon, known as assortative mating, can reinforce social class divisions because educational attainment strongly influences income, employment stability, and access to opportunities across generations.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, higher education has expanded dramatically throughout Western countries. At the same time, the long-standing male advantage in university completion has not only disappeared but reversed, with women now more likely than men to earn university degrees. This shift has fundamentally changed the pool of potential partners available to young adults.

Comparing the United States and France

To examine these long-term changes, Julia Leesch of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research and Jan Skopek of Trinity College Dublin analyzed decades of data from two countries with markedly different education systems. The United States developed a decentralized, demand-driven education system that expanded mass secondary education relatively early in the twentieth century.

France, by contrast, operates a centralized and highly stratified education system, where large-scale educational expansion occurred later, primarily after the Second World War. These contrasting educational histories provide an ideal opportunity to examine how structural changes in schooling influence marriage markets over time.

The researchers analyzed census and survey data for partnered women aged 25 to 34 in both countries. For France, the analysis included data collected between 1962 and 2011, while the United States dataset covered the period from 1960 to 2015. Focusing on women in this age group allowed the researchers to capture patterns in first unions, when most individuals typically establish long-term partnerships.

To ensure consistent comparisons across countries and time periods, educational attainment was classified into three broad categories: lower secondary education or less, completed secondary education, and completed university education. This classification allowed the researchers to track changes in different types of couples over five decades.

Using Counterfactual "What If" Models

The researchers applied a statistical technique known as counterfactual decomposition to disentangle several overlapping trends. In simple terms, the method creates mathematical "what if" scenarios by holding some variables constant while allowing others to change, then comparing the resulting hypothetical outcomes.

For example, the team estimated what marriage patterns would have looked like if the relationship between gender and educational attainment had remained the same as it was in the 1960s, while overall levels of education continued to rise. This allowed them to determine how much of the observed change was driven by the general expansion of education versus the specific increase in women earning university degrees.

The approach also helped clarify whether changes in educational assortative mating were primarily driven by the expansion of schooling, the reversal of the gender gap in higher education, or shifts in people's partner preferences and mate selection strategies. It further revealed how these factors interact, sometimes reinforcing one another and sometimes offsetting each other's effects.

Homogamy Increased, but Differently in Each Country

In the United States, the proportion of young women whose partners had the same level of education increased steadily over time. Approximately 62% of partnered women were in educationally homogamous unions in 1960. By 2000, that figure had risen to nearly 71%, after which it largely stabilized. These findings indicate a growing tendency for Americans to form relationships with partners who have similar educational backgrounds.

This increase was strongly influenced by the changing relationship between gender and educational attainment, as women first caught up with and later surpassed men in university graduation rates. It also reflected changes in partner selection, with people increasingly placing greater value on shared educational backgrounds and similar lifestyles.

At the same time, educational expansion created an important structural counterbalance. As fewer Americans left school with only low levels of education, marriages between two less-educated individuals declined substantially. However, this decrease was almost perfectly offset by a corresponding rise in marriages between two university graduates.

France displayed a more complex U-shaped pattern in educational homogamy. The proportion of couples with matching educational levels initially declined as educational opportunities expanded and more individuals entered intermediate levels of education. Later, as university education became increasingly widespread, educational homogamy began to rise once again.

In France, the overall expansion of education itself largely accounted for this U-shaped trend. During the early stages of educational expansion, marriages between two less-educated individuals declined more rapidly than marriages between two university graduates could increase. Only from the 1990s onward did the rapid growth in highly educated couples outweigh those earlier declines.

The Decline of Educational Hypergamy

Beyond couples with matching educational backgrounds, the researchers also examined unions in which partners differed in educational attainment. In the United States, the proportion of women with more education than their partners followed a non-linear pattern, declining until the 1980s before rising again during the following decades.

Meanwhile, the proportion of women with lower educational attainment than their partners declined steadily from the 1970s onward. This trend reflects both structural changes in educational attainment and evolving social norms surrounding marriage, careers, and gender roles.

In both France and the United States, the reversal of the gender gap in higher education clearly contributed to the decline in educational hypergamy. As women became more highly educated, there were simply fewer university-educated men without equally or more highly educated female counterparts to marry, reducing the pool of traditionally hypergamous matches.

However, the counterfactual simulations showed that the broader expansion of education complicates this picture. According to the models, if overall educational attainment in the United States had increased without any change in the gender distribution of university graduates, the country would actually have experienced a structural decline in hypogamy.

In other words, expanding educational opportunities for everyone would, by itself, have reduced the proportion of marriages in which wives were more highly educated than their husbands. The growing number of female university graduates pushed in the opposite direction by increasing hypogamy. These opposing structural forces often offset one another, masking their individual effects in the overall data.

Limitations, Changing Behavior, and Future Research

The researchers tested the robustness of their findings through several sensitivity analyses. They expanded the hypothetical partner pool to include men up to 39 years of age, allowing for larger age differences between partners, and repeated the analyses using a more detailed four-level educational classification. The main findings remained consistent across all alternative specifications.

Leesch and Skopek caution that structural changes in the marriage market do not operate independently of broader cultural and economic developments. Changes in gender wage gaps, increasing income inequality, and evolving attitudes toward work and family all influence how people choose partners and when they decide to marry or cohabit.

The rapid growth of online dating has also transformed how people meet, weakening many of the geographic and social barriers that once shaped local marriage markets. Although the statistical models account for existing patterns of assortative mating, individual behavior continues to evolve as the composition of the dating pool changes.

One important limitation of the study is the assumption that people primarily search for partners within a relatively narrow age range. In reality, individuals facing a shortage of potential partners with their preferred educational background may broaden their search by considering older or younger partners or by delaying union formation until they find a more suitable match.

The authors also note that rising ages at first marriage and first cohabitation may influence relationship patterns beyond the 25-to-34-year-old age group examined in the study. Migration further reshapes local marriage markets by introducing new combinations of educational attainment, cultural background, and socioeconomic characteristics.

Ultimately, the researchers emphasize that separating the effects of educational expansion from the reversal of the gender gap is primarily a theoretical exercise. In reality, both developments occurred simultaneously. Nevertheless, counterfactual decomposition provides a powerful analytical tool for understanding the demographic mechanisms underlying changes in modern relationship formation.