Too educated to be married? An investigation into the relationship between education and marriage in China

ABSTRACT

Human capital theory suggests that investment in education may generate marriage market returns. However, high expectations for potential marital partners by highly educated individuals, coupled with the huge cost of marriage driven by soaring housing prices in China, may discourage marriage intentions of highly educated people. Using the data from the China Family Panel Studies survey, we found that individuals with college education and above on average are less likely to get married than those who only finished high school or below. Our results are robust to potential functional misspecification and omitted variable bias. We also investigated possible explanations. Results indicate that, compared with individuals who have less than a college degree, those with at least a college degree are more likely to marry a person who has a college degree or above. In addition, an increase in housing prices exacerbates the negative impact of education on marriage.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• marriage
• housing price
• China

JEL:

• D13
• J12
• P36

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 See Hu and Wang (2020) for details on determinants of marriage.

2 Basu (2002) reviews critically some of the more common mechanisms behind the negative relation between female education and fertility. The reasons for the choice of family size (that is, the number of living children wanted) and marriage is not the same since people can have children without transforming their relationship into marriage.

3 Community data in the CFPS are not publicly available.

4 We find the results are quite similar when we restrict our attention to the interviews aged between 30 and 60, thus ruling out other factors that are hard to control for causality. For example, individuals who study at school at all educational levels have low likelihood of getting married for several reasons, such as academic pressure.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge the supports from the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (No. 2020A1515010359; No. 2019A1515011921), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 72074097; No. 71902072; No. 71774144), and the Major Research Project of Philosophy and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education (No. 18JZD033).