No trend toward assortative mating for education? Looking around in GSS data today, I discovered that there is no observable trend toward men marrying women of similar educational levels over the past 8o plus years. The correlation was around .6 from the 1920s (based on elderly people's answers given in the 1970s) through the 1970s, and came in at .55 by the 1990s, and there it remains. This puzzles me. I know the older the respondents, the higher the rate of attrition, but do individuals from educationally dissimilar marriages die at younger ages than their counterparts? And I based my 1970s correlations on young people, and the results were no different.
Has there been an observable trend toward men marrying women of more similar IQ levels over that time period? If no as well, that would be even more surprising to me.
ReplyDeleteHas the correlation between IQ and education level gone down during the period (possibly due to much wider access/ dumbing down of edu., affirmative action, etc.)? If yes, then that may help explain why assortive mating by education level has not increased.