Why elite universities are bad for marriage

Consider two young men. They’re similar in every way. One chooses an elite university, one doesn’t. Research has shown both end up earning the same later in life. It makes sense. They’re both intelligent, talented individuals. But when two women try the same thing, the one at the elite university ends up on average earning13.9 per cent more two decades later.

Why did choosing more-selective colleges change the trajectories of women but not men?

The short answer is marriage, according to a working paper by economists Suqin Ge of Virginia Tech, Elliott Isaac of Tulane University and Amalia Miller of the University of Virginia that built on an earlier analysis of women entering post-secondary studies in 1976. The new paper was circulated recently by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

A woman graduating from a more selective school was 3.9 percentage points less likely to end up married two decades later than a woman who was accepted at similar schools but chose to attend one where average SAT scores (used to determine entry eligibility) were 100 points lower.

That difference in marital status has a huge impact on lifetime earnings potential. The married women were about 18.6 percentage points less likely to work outside the home overall.

In addition, attending a more selective school boosts women’s odds of going on to an advanced degree, by 4.8 percentage points, which also increases earnings potential.

The results hold true even for women whose mothers were working, which tends to increase the likelihood they will pursue college and careers.

Ge, Isaac and Miller are revisiting an influential 2002 paper by Stacy Dale, now of Mathematica Policy Research, and Princeton University economist Alan Krueger. Dale and Krueger analyzed detailed testing, application and acceptance data for thousands of students who entered 30 colleges and universities in 1976, and followed up with them two decades later.

Many recent studies have gone beyond paycheques to measure other benefits of higher education, including health, status and social networks. This work might explain why top schools continue to attract record numbers of applicants, despite studies showing their surprisingly low impact on earnings. The marriage market could be one reason.

“For a long time parents wanted to send their kids to a very good school in hopes that they would find their spouse there,” Dale said.

UCLA economist Paola Giuliano, who has published several works on labour force and family status, noted several recent studies had found that “there is some cost in the marriage market for women who do well.”

University of Colorado at Boulder economist Murat Iyigun’s 2009 American Economic Review analysis showed education has a much larger impact on women’s future earnings and marriagemarket outcomes than it does for men. His work, conducted with Pierre-André Chiappori of Columbia University and Yoram Weiss of Tel Aviv University, didn’t address a school’s selectivity, but he said that otherwise Ge, Isaac and Miller’s findings were in line with their model.

But more important, when accounting for women who left the workforce after university, the new findings show that women who went to more-selective colleges earned significantly more — almost entirely because they became more likely to work and less likely to marry.