[Edited to include divorces]
The American Community Survey (ACS) collects information on how many times people have been married. Using the 2024 ACS, we can see how that changes across ages. Getting married is what we call an absorbing state. Once you get married once, you’ll never be married zero times again. So long as people get married across the age distribution, the proportion of never married people falls.
The same is true for getting married a 2nd time. Then, you’ll never have been married once ever again. While the proportion of people never married must shrink with age, the proportion of people married once can rise. If a few people get divorced or married a 2nd time, but an even bigger number of people get marred for the first time, then the group of people married only once can grow. The ACS stops measuring once someone has been married three times – then it’s “three or more” times. A subsequent divorce the universal absorbing state. Those people never go into another category.
The chart shows the proportion of people by age and the number of times that they’ve been married. Darker hues reflect divorces.* Importantly, this is the snapshot in 2024. So each age group is a cohort snapshot in time. That’s why the proportion of people in their 80s who’ve been married zero or one time is greater than people in their 70s. They’re a different cohort. When the now 80-year-olds were in their 70s, the sum of the blue and light yellow bars were larger than for more recent 70-year-olds.
A favorite pass time of economists is to think about the theoretical mechanism by which social outcomes occur. We tend to enjoy the spit-balling and thinking about the potential causes. When a proposed mechanism turns out to be unimportant, the data should be a bit random looking.
For example, let’s consider people ages 70 and older to be near the end of their life. So, that group of older people can give us a good idea of the terminal distribution of how many times people get married. About 6% of people never marry, 66% get married once (6.5% stay divorced) , 21% get married twice (3% stay divorced), and 6% get married 3+ times (1% stay divorced). So among these most popular undergraduate majors for the older cohort, about 30% of first marriages ended in divorce (if we ignore widowed).
Getting married only once and staying married implies a certain amount of relational stability. Those people stayed married for a long time, stayed unmarried for a long time, or both. But they didn’t divorce. Stability may not be the right word for when someone is unmarried, but it certainly avoids a degree of additional legal complication, for better or worse, that exists for married people.
With these ideas in the back of our heads, which college majors holders would you expect to have more versus fewer lifetime marriages? What about divorces? We know that there is some selection into college majors and reason to think they differ post graduation, so we should be able to spitball about how college major is related to lifetime marriage frequency.
Below is the graph for the 25 most popular college majors held by people ages 70+. The trick is that any group can be sorted by number of marriages. And almost any result would look striking just due to sorted differences caused by noise. But, if there is any pattern among types of college majors and marriage counts, then that implies that a relationship between major and marriage may exist.
Most people have multiple consecutive spouses due to divorce rather than due to spousal death. So, generally, more marriages implies more divorces. Which college majors tend to be more stable, either never married or never divorced? The least stable majors are at the top, and most stable are at the bottom. The most stable majors are dominated by education , engineering, and chemistry majors. Every major with ‘education’ or ‘engineering’ in the name tends not to divorce at high rates. And engineers tend to get married at especially high rates (even after divorces).
Those differences don’t look large, but let’s think about pieces of the categories rather than the entire population. Look at the major with the most marriages, “Fine Arts”. Among them 90.5% have had a first marriage. 42.6% have had a divorce or second marriage. Therefore 47.1% of fine art majors who were ever ended leaving their spouse one way or another. Since that’s a uniquely high divorce rate and comports to my biases, I’m willing to call that a thing.
Except for business administration, college majors with more divorces and marriages are ones that I’d broadly characterize by people who have a lot of ‘feelings’. These include psychology, fine arts, liberal arts, and English. Art and Music Education majors are near the middle of the distribution, as if they are characterized by ‘feelings’ and whatever it is about education majors that makes them relatively stable partners. Though, one commonality that all ‘arts’ majors share is that they have high rates of never married people. Majors in the middle of the y-axis exhibit less of a pattern. Economics majors are not exceptional here.
Personally, I’m struck by how many people have had 3+ marriages. If you think that the number of 1-marriage people is high, then keep in mind that the general pattern nationally is that high-education individuals tend to divorce at lower rates – and this sample is only among those with at least a bachelor’s degree.
Sorry especially to my colorblind friends. Stata does support patterned bars (what the heck?).
