Finally, people with less education appear to be leading the trends with respect to marriage and marital stability, regardless of race. Again, there may be lessons here for thinking about family change more broadly. Generally, as marital stability and, eventually, marriage formation became more strongly linked to the transition into stable employment for both men and women, blacks’ economic disadvantage became a greater impediment to marriage. The legacy of legal discrimination, as well as continued racial bias in friendship networks, residential preferences, and mate preferences, all contribute to racial inequalities within education groups. Yet whites are not immune to structural forces. Growing inequality has contributed to high rates of divorce among less-educated whites for decades, and, more recently, has started to erode their marriage opportunities as well.
