This chart from the Economist in 2007 is pretty remarkable:

Chart: Divorces by education level and year

Some highlights:

  • Between 1975 and 1995, divorce rates for people without a high school education climbed from 40% to over 55%. People with high school degrees or who dropped out of college did a bit better, but not much. (This appears to be for divorces within the first 10 years of marriage.)
  • During the same period, divorce rates for college graduates went from 25-30% to about 15%.

The article has a lot of interesting details. There's the obligatory anecdote:

And yet, for all their protestations of wildness, the students are a serious-minded bunch. Yes, they have pre-marital sex. “I don't see how it's a bad thing,” says Ashley, an 18-year-old studying criminology. But they are careful not to fall pregnant. It would be “a major disaster,” says Ashley. She has plans. She wants to finish her degree, go to the FBI academy in Virginia and then start a career as a “profiler” helping to catch dangerous criminals. She wants to get married when she is about 24, and have children perhaps at 26. She thinks having children out of wedlock is not wrong, but unwise.

A few blocks away, in a soup kitchen attached to a church, another 18-year-old balances a baby on her knee. Laura has a less planned approach to parenthood. “It just happened,” she says. The father and she were “never really together”, merely “friends with benefits, I guess”. He is now gone. “I didn't want to put up with his stuff,” she says. “Drugs and stuff,” she adds, by way of explanation.

Some stats to back it up:

Among the elite (excluding film stars), the nuclear family is holding up quite well. Only 4% of the children of mothers with college degrees are born out of wedlock. And the divorce rate among college-educated women has plummeted. Of those who first tied the knot between 1975 and 1979, 29% were divorced within ten years. Among those who first married between 1990 and 1994, only 16.5% were.

The conservatives in the audience will find this bit interesting:

American men, once married, tend to take their responsibilities seriously. Avner Ahituv of the University of Haifa and Robert Lerman of the Urban Institute found that “entering marriage raises hours worked quickly and substantially.” Married men drink less, take fewer drugs and work harder, earning between 10% and 40% more than single men with similar schooling and job histories.

Overall, for a decade-old article, it's quite interesting. And the class divide appears very stark: People with college degrees are getting married, having kids within wedlock, and avoiding divorce. People high school degrees or less have much higher rates of out-of-wedlock births, lower marriage rates, and higher divorce rates.

How does this match your real-world experience?

Looking back to my college years (well before Tinder, to be fair), I remember that most people, male and female, could find relationships. Sure, shy people usually took a few years to figure it out.

I definitely can't remember any women dating guys for money. I mean, why would they? Nearly everybody was a broke college student, and nearly everybody had a bright future ahead of them.

It was generally expected that most people, male and female, would have a few relationships before settling down. Experienced guys were a tiny bit reluctant to be become involved with a virgin, because they felt it was a bigger responsibility. For both men and women, 5 partners was no big deal. 20 would probably have raised questions about compatibility, but it mostly would mean that you wound up with somebody with a similar background. 50 or 200, well, people would assume that having lots of casual sex was a major hobby, and this would definitely have factored into questions about compatibility for LTRs. Not in an "Eww, gross" way, but more in "Do we have compatible goals?"

Nobody I knew seemed to have any problem with this. Most people intended to find a good partner, typically by having a LTR survive several years without discovering any obvious problems. And most people succeeded, and I've heard of very few divorces.

My experience backs up what The Economist claims about people with university degrees. How do people from other backgrounds and more recent decades feel about it?