Marriage Has Become a Rich Person’s Affair: A Selection from Daniel Markovits’s The Meritocracy Trap (2019)

“Elites do not just increasingly marry each other but also increasingly stay married and raise children within mature, stable marriages. This difference increasingly distinguishes the elite from not just the poor but also the middle class. And the distinction confers a massive advantage on children born into rich families.

To begin with, elite, educated women increasingly bear children only after marrying, as compared to their less elite, less educated counterparts. In 1970, out-of-marriage births accounted for only about 10 percent of births to women across all education levels. Today, by contrast, education overwhelmingly determines the relationship between marriage and motherhood. Among college- and post-college-educated women, only one in twenty and one in thirty children are born outside of marriage. By contrast, in the least educated two-thirds of the population, comprising women with a high school education or less, nearly 60 percent of all children are born outside of marriage. Overall, the average mother with a high school degree only or some college (but no BA) has children two years before marriage, whereas the average college-educated mother has children two years after marriage.

Elite marriages also increasingly outlast their less elite counterparts. Between 1960 and 1980, divorce rates roughly tripled for all Americans, but since 1980, marriage has polarized along socioeconomic lines. Divorce rates remained steady, and perhaps even increased slightly, in the bottom three-quarters of the economic distribution, whereas in the top quarter, divorce has declined, indeed back to 1960 levels. Today, women without a college degree experience divorce within ten years of marriage at more than twice the rate of women college graduates: roughly 35 percent versus roughly 15 percent. More broadly, between 1960 and 2010, the share of adults who are currently married fell by twice as much for Americans without a college degree as for those who had earned a BA (and the decline among those with some college but no degree roughly equaled the decline for those with high school educations only).

In all these ways, marriage has become a rich person’s affair, and children of rich, well-educated parents are now enormously more likely than other children—including not just poor but also middle-class children—to grow up in households with both parents present. . . . 90 percent of children living in the richest and best-educated 5 percent of American zip codes live with both their biological parents.”—Daniel Markovits, The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite (2019)