Higher Education Is A Safeguard Against Divorce—Not A Cause
There are things (and people) that are so memetically reviled that their name precedes them—Miracle Whip, Jeffrey Epstein, high school, Minions—and somewhere, somehow, on that list, we nailed educated women to the proverbial cross. Those sour, loaded words: ‘educated,’ ‘women.’ The tongue is dripping with bitterness almost every time they escape someone’s lips, at least on this side of the internet.
The mental baggage elicited from those politically charged words is so evocative, that the stories nearly write themselves: if only modern women stopped prioritizing their girlboss careers over starting a family, society wouldn’t be in shambles, my hairline wouldn’t be receding, and I’d have me a government-issued trad wife to pick up after me. The only problem with this little catch-all monocausality is that it’s, well, complete misinformation that’s become mythologized through memes and single men with an axe to grind with “modern women” (the problem being, they aren’t getting picked.)
I encounter this meme online all the time, citing the over-education of women as a cause of divorce. One person even mentioned the fact that educated women “file for divorce 75% of the time” as the reason educated women “should just not get married since they can’t handle not getting everything they imagine in life.” Here’s the reality: continuing your education past high school is one of the best investments you can make if you’re concerned with divorce risk. Continual education is a protective factor against divorce, singlehood, and spousal death, and this increases in tandem with higher educational attainment. In other words, not only are educated women less likely to divorce but they also get married at higher rates than their less educated counterparts and are less likely to become widows.
And citing the fact that “educated women file for divorce 75% of the time” is hardly indicative of what they think. It’s true that women initiate divorce about 70% of the time and that this statistic is even higher among educated women—up to 90%, but that only demonstrates women are more likely to take the initiative to file the paperwork to end the marriage legally, not that they were the source of the marriage breakdown itself.
Datepsych conducted an in-depth analysis of census data to show the relationship between education and relationship outcomes. This research focuses on men and women between the ages of 28 and 40 because very few Americans are married before 28 (12.9%). It’s worth pointing out that, despite young married couples from yore having great marriages, those who marry younger in today's society, especially under the age of 25, face higher risks of divorce.
According to the Institute for Family Studies, someone who marries at 25 is over 50 percent less likely to get divorced than someone who gets married at 20, citing lack of maturity, coping skills, and social support as potential reasons youthful couples struggle to cultivate marriages that last.
The sweet spot? Between the ages of 28 to 32, also known as the “Goldilocks zone.” Marrying before 28 is linked to higher divorce rates because of factors like financial instability (poverty is another risk factor for divorce) and immaturity. However, marrying after 32 poses an additional 5% risk of divorce for every additional year past this age. As much as right-wing men online like to guilt trip women into needing to marry as early as possible, it turns out that’s counter-intuitive if the goal is to prevent divorce.
However, this strategy certainly isn't a one-size-fits-all. If you're not yet in the "sweet spot" of aging but have found your perfect match, waiting for the sake of waiting to get married may not be the wisest decision either.
According to Datepsych’s breakdown of census data for women aged 28 to 40, the most educated women in that age bracket are the most likely to be married by a significant margin. 70% of women aged 28 to 40 with Master’s degrees, PhDs, and other professional degrees are married, while only 50% of women with high school education are married. It’s just slightly over 50% for women who went to college but didn’t get a degree. This trend persists with age: among women in the 41 to 55 age group, over 75% with advanced degrees (like a Master’s, PhD, professionals) are married, whereas fewer than 60% of women with only a high school education are married.
These aren’t isolated findings. According to research performed at the National Center for Health Statistics, college-educated women who entered first-time marriages between 2006 and 2010 could expect their marriages to last at least 20 years, but that drops to 49% for women who only received “some college” and down to 40% for women who only received high school education or less.
But why is education protective of divorce? Essentially, the traits that make someone a good partner and increase your likelihood of relationship success are the same traits that contribute to academic performance. Those are prosocial traits like agreeableness and conscientiousness. Agreeableness is predictive of academic performance, attractiveness, and relationship quality, all of which stave off divorce.
Conscientiousness, likewise, is predictive of both relationship success and academic performance, as conscientious people have a disposition for duty and diligence, and the trait is negatively associated with antisocial personality traits found in the Dark Triad or cluster B personality disorders. Conscientious people generally have more positive life outcomes—higher educational attainment, better grades, higher self-control, higher job income, better physical health, relationship satisfaction, relationship commitment, and, you guessed it, lower divorce rates.
Pursuing higher education is also associated with higher incomes, which is protective against poverty (a major divorce risk), as well as other negative traits that would increase one’s risk of divorce, like rates of domestic violence, incarceration, and substance abuse. Datepsych’s analysis also emphasizes assortative mating as a major reason higher education reduces the risk of divorce.
Assortative mating is the tendency to choose partners similar to ourselves (typically in personality traits, attractiveness, social status, education, income, and so on). Couples matched educationally typically share similar values, life goals, and socioeconomic status, which leads to greater marital compatibility and stability. He also notes that women are naturally hypergamous, meaning women have a revealed preference for men who are of higher status than them and, likewise, more educated than them.
Women generally pair up with men who are of equal or higher education than them (though women increasingly need to contend with the fact that there may not be enough to go around with current gender gaps in education). Because people tend to mate assortatively (with other people in their immediate environment from similar backgrounds), women who don’t go to college are less likely to pair up with educated men since educated people who occupy the same social spheres tend to date each other.
For those who like to speak in more blunt, crude terms like “sexual market value,” women who marry “high-value men” tend to meet them at expensive prep schools or in elite, highly educated environments, not at the local IHOP, as your conspicuously aggressive Twitter (now X) mutual insists. Though most college graduates don’t meet their spouse in college, by mere virtue of going to college (especially Ivy Leagues), you enter a refined dating pool for the rest of your life, as Rob Henderson has written about in his Substack article, “The Hidden Marriage Market.”
Henderson describes these colleges and universities as modern, Western-arranged matchmaking services. He cites a 2005 study on assortative mating in marriages that noted if your highest level of education is a high school diploma, your probability of marrying a college graduate is only 9%, while it’s a whopping 65% for a fellow college graduate (and is probably even higher today).
For women, going to college certainly isn’t statistically hurting their chance at finding love. On the contrary, it seems to be the single best thing you can do to find a like-minded partner (15% of engaged couples met in college or grad school), get married, and, most importantly, stay married. Don’t let anyone psyop you into believing you’re destined to be a single cat lady or an over-educated divorcee because you dared to attend college. Anyone telling you otherwise is just coping.