If rising unemployment and incarceration among black men fully explained the racial gap in marriage, we would expect racial differences in marriage among people with the same level of education to be small; we would also expect such differences to be concentrated among economically disadvantaged blacks. After all, black men without any college education were affected most by both trends.38 Yet, although the racial marriage gap is largest among those who didn’t go to college, we see a gap at all levels of the educational distribution. For example, among college-graduate women in 2012, 71 percent of blacks had ever married, compared to 88 percent of whites (see table 3). Moreover, while we see differences by education in the proportion of black women in their early 40s who have ever married, there are no clear educational differences among white women. We see a similar pattern in the proportion of men who have ever married, although data from 2012 show some evidence that white men with a high school degree or less are moving away from marriage.
