But, as we’ve argued, looking at the proportion of people who are married by midlife doesn’t capture the most recent changes in marriage patterns among younger women. To overcome this problem, we calculated age-specific marriage rates using data from the 2008–12 American Community Survey (see figures 3a and 3b). Here we see signs that white women with a high school degree or less are beginning to retreat from marriage. Starting in their early 20s, white women with a bachelor’s degree have higher marriage rates than white women with lower levels of education. In fact, marriage rates for college-educated white women in their late 20s and early 30s are higher than those for white women with less education at any age. Their higher marriage rates persist through the peak marrying ages, until their mid-40s. This is a dramatic change from white women’s marriage patterns in the late 1970s, when peak age-specific marriage rates for less-educated women were considerably higher than those ever observed among college-educated women.39 In the near future, the proportion who have ever married at age 40 may fall among white women with less than a college degree, both absolutely and relative to their better-educated counterparts.40
