Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Marriage*

Maggie Gallagher in National Review Online examines a Pop Quiz on Marriage conducted by Institute for Marriage and Public Policy. The answers to a couple questions surprised me because they dispelled conventional wisdom. Here is one:

3. True or False: Marriages are much more likely to end in divorce today than they were 20 years ago. False. The overall divorce rate peaked around 1980 and appears to have declined modestly since then. Divorce rates per 1,000 marriages were 22.6 in 1980, 20.9 in 1990, and 18.8 in 2000(latest data: 2004: 17.7). (National Marriage Project, State of Our Unions, 2005.) According to a recent study divorce rates among the college-educated have fallen the most dramatically since the 1970s, while rates among less-educated Americans may have risen slightly. Between the early '70s and the early '90s the proportion of women with college diplomas whose marriages dissolved in the first ten years plummeted from 24.3 percent to 16.7 percent. Divorce rates among those with less than a college degree, meanwhile, increased slightly from 33.7 percent to 35.7 percent.

The answer to that question surprised me in a couple ways. First, I assumed divorce rate were steadily getting worse an apparently that isn't the case. Secondly, I incorrectly assumed college grads would have a higher divorce rate than non-college grads. Read the article and see how many you'd get right.