How Will Your Level of Education Effect Your Relationship?

 “Marriage can wait, education cannot.” Khaled Hosseini

My dad always said that no education is ever wasted; even if you don’t end up using it, it makes you a better person. It turns out there is a further reason: if you want to decrease your chance of divorce, you should stay in school. Study after study has found that the higher your level of education, the lower your chance of divorce.

Eli Finkel, a psychologist, reports that since the early eighties, divorce rates among the university or college educated have plummeted. For couples in their forties, the divorce rate is fifty percent lower for those with a college degree, compared with those just having a high school diploma. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics found, “...the divorce rate for first marriages is nearly twenty percentage points lower for those who have completed their bachelor’s degree, compared with those who have completed high school, regardless of whether they have some college or not. The gap is even greater – approaching thirty percentage points – when comparing those with a college degree to those with less than a high school diploma.”

Finkel goes on to explain that the picture is bleak for those that don’t put a premium on education. “...people who don’t have a high school degree, people who are relatively uneducated have a higher divorce rate than ever, and a lower marriage rate, and when they are married, the marriages tend not to be as satisfying.” The divorce rate among those least educated continues to grow faster then average.

In case you missed it, people with a lower education are less likely to marry in the first place. It is shown that for men, the probability of marriage increases with education. With women too, we see the probability of a wedding goes up as education increases and so does the age at which they marry...but the better educated women are also more likely to marry, period.

We can’t say that education, per se, is the reason. Perhaps it is the sort of person that gets a higher education is more likely to remain married. People who choose higher education may be planners. Maybe they are better at communication or have better coping skills. Perhaps they are just more knowledgeable and have learned more negotiation skills. Higher education requires us to step outside our comfort zone and changes our attitudes. It could be that it’s marrying later that matters, as they say our brains at twenty-five do not correlate with who we are at fifty, but age thirty does. This makes sense, since the younger you are when you marry, the greater the divorce risk.

It stands to reason that those with less education may have poorer life circumstances. A degree is often required for higher paying jobs, so someone who didn’t complete high school may struggle each month just to get by. Finkel writes about this, “It’s really difficult to have a productive, happy marriage when your life circumstances are so stressful and when your day-to-day life involves, say three or four bus routes in order to get to your job.” Economic hardship is a factor that increases a couple’s probability of divorce. A couple that can barely pay bills each month isn’t likely to be able to access or afford sources of help like marriage counselling. In addition, people with lower levels of education are less likely to attend counselling even if it is within their means.

When we are in love and can’t get enough of this person, you can’t imagine ever not feeling this way. When something feels so good, you want forever after to start right away. It is possible, certainly, to get married and complete your education, but is it possible to give your full attention to both? It turns out it’s probably better to postpone the ceremony. When we are getting our education, it is similar to having a growing relationship. We are becoming someone new, someone different.

I have often heard the lament, ‘but I put him/her through medical school..’. Tarayn Grizzard from Harvard Medical School discovered, “Many medical students are married or become married in the course of medical school, but statistics indicate that these marriages have a poor prognosis. In some medical specialties and subspecialties, the divorce rates climb to over 50 percent...” It isn’t just medical school either. It turns out many couples, married or otherwise break up around graduation. Like I said, these are often growing relationships and after we are fully cooked, our paths diverge.

Maybe it is better to wait and see who they are on the other side of their education.