Examining variations in marriage rates across colleges

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Young adulthood is not only the time when most people attend college, but also a time when many marry. In fact, both attending college and marrying are linked and have important social and economic consequences for individuals, particularly women, and their families.


When–and if—people get married is an important topic due to the presence of assortative mating. This phenomenon, in which a person is likely to marry someone with similar characteristics such as education, is a contributing factor to increasing levels of income inequality. In some circles, there is pressure to marry someone with a similar pedigree, as evidenced by the high-profile Princeton alumna who urged women at the university to find a spouse while in college. For people attending less-selective colleges, having the possibility of a second household income represents a key buffer against economic shocks.
To explore this issue, I use a tremendous dataset compiled by The Equality of Opportunity Project that is based on de-identified tax records for 48 million Americans born between 1980-1991. This dataset has received a great deal of attention due to its social mobility index, which examines the percentage of students who move well up in the income distribution by young adulthood.
I use the publicly available dataset to examine marriage rates of traditional-age college students through age 34 based on their primary institution of attendance. Particular attention is focused on the extent to which institutional marriage rates seem to be affected by the institution itself versus the types of students who happen to enroll there. My analyses are based on 820 public and private nonprofit four-year colleges that had marriage rates and other characteristics available at the institutional level; this excludes a number of public universities that reported tax data as a system, such as all four-year institutions in Arizona and Wisconsin.
The first two figures below show the distribution of marriage rates ...

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