(C) Iowa Capital Dispatch
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ISU study dives into marriage, education rates and their connection • Iowa Capital Dispatch [1]
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Date: 2025-08-15
In the hope of prompting further study, research from Iowa State University is revealing nuance present in an answer to an increasingly asked question: Why are marriage rates falling, and is more education making an impact?
ISU economics professor John Winters and Kunwon Ahn, an ISU alum currently working as an associate research fellow at the Korea Labor Institute, published a study comparing marriage rates of groups at different ages to the level of education they’re likely to have. While they found going to college makes someone less likely to get married at a younger age, in older age groups the answers get more complicated.
Winters said the relationship between marriage and higher education is a tricky one, as historical data says one thing while cross-sectional data, or data of a population at one point in time, says another.
“We really wanted to get into this and try to get an estimate of the causal impact,” Winters said.
Education has been an area of study for Winters for nearly his entire career, he said, but marriage is something new for him. He took an interest in marriage after looking at how rates of people having children have changed over time, and he and Ahn decided to see if there was any relationship to be found.
Trend data has shown that when education rates rise, marriage rates fall, Winters said, but cross-sectional data indicates people with more education are more likely to be married than those with less.
An initial look at education and marriage trends would lead some people to believe rising education is causing fewer marriages, but Winters said it isn’t nearly that simple.
Using data from the American Community Survey, which includes information from as many as eight million people, and information from previous decennial censuses, Winters and Ahn built cohorts of groups across the years to assess maternal education levels from the 1980s and compare it to adults surveyed between 2006 and 2019.
Rather than looking at individual data lines to see how much education someone has received, Winters said they took average education levels across the cohort, as it helped in predicting education rates of the next generations. This helped the researchers look at potential causal relationships by eliminating other factors that could determine someone’s decisions about marriage or school.
What the researchers found is that there is evidence that education lowers the marriage rate for people ages 25-34, but that doesn’t mean they won’t ever get married. For those ages 45-54, however, education isn’t having an impact on marriage rates. Winters said receiving more education definitely delays marriage, but many people “catch up” later on.
“We find clear evidence that additional education, additional schooling, is lowering their marriage rates,” Winters said. “But once we move past that, we don’t see as much of an adverse effect. So by the time we get to ages 45 to 54 which is kind of our oldest cohort that we can examine here, there’s really no difference.”
Even within those findings, Winters said there is still nuance to be found in the relationship between education and matrimony. While education slightly increases the chances of someone never getting married, he said it also lowers rates of divorce and separation.
This study helps in calming any fears about the possibility of too much education driving marriage rates to zero, Winters said, but it still leaves open another question — if education isn’t driving marriage rate fluctuations, what is?
Further study of other factors impacting marriage could help chip away at this query, Winters said, and maybe answer others. Looking at marriage rates as well as fertility rates, and researching the economic drivers and resources that both provide and take, is another area with economic consequences Winter believes should be studied.
“We didn’t necessarily have really strong beliefs in terms of what we would find,” Winters said. “So finding these results, really, we do think was informative. We think it’s helpful to understand that your education does interact with marriage and kind of these interesting ways.”
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