In 1997, 238,000 American women earned their master's degree, compared with 24,000 in 1960.  For the same time period, the number of men receiving their master's degree rose from 51,000 to 181,000.  In 1960, women constituted 32 percent of master's candidates, while in 1997, they were the majority, at almost 57 percent.

(Source: The U. S. National Center on Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, annual, in the U. S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2000 [120th edition], Washington, DC, 2000, p. 193.)

"The sagging economy has created a bonanza of applicants for the nation's schools of business, law, journalism, education and many other graduate programs as laid-off workers and college seniors are deciding to wait out the recession by honing their skills.

College job placement offices may be in the doldrums, but admissions officers at many of the nation's professional schools and graduate programs say they are being inundated with applications.

The trend is striking. Admission officers at Emory University business school say applications were up 80 percent at the end of the first round in the admissions cycle in December in comparison to the same period last season; those at U.C.L.A. report a 90 percent increase and those at the University of Chicago report a 100 percent jump. Yale University Law School says applications are up 57 percent at this point in the season compared to the same point last year while Vanderbilt says its applications are up 47 percent. Engineering and education schools talk of similar surges. The bars for entrance have been raised."

(Source: Yilu Zhao, "Many Ride Out the Recession in a Graduate School Harbor," The New York Times, January 24, 2002.)

Time was when the brainy women who got college degrees were likely to end up as old maids.  This is no longer the case.  In an article recently published in the American Sociological Review, sociologists from Princeton University highlight an "educational crossover . . .for both black women and white women in recent cohorts, [which] suggests that marriage is increasingly becoming a province of the most educated."

To be sure, in their analysis of national survey data, the Princeton scholars do detect a trend toward higher age at first marriage among American women (men, too, for that matter).  American women, at least the better-educated ones, are still marrying.  The researchers interpret this as evidence that, "unlike in Sweden, where cohabitation appears to have become a substitute for marriage among a substantial portion of the population," here in the United States, "marriage remains a normative part of adult life."

Why the curious "reversal of the relationship between education and marriage"?  The authors of the new study suggest that marriageable men realize that "they, too, benefit if their wives are more highly educated."  Furthermore, in looking at the relatively low marriage rate among poorly educated American women, the researchers conjecture that they reflect the "greater obstacles to marriage among those who cannot afford it." 

The Princeton scholars' interpretation of their findings deserves respect as intelligent and plausible.  Yet in looking at how marriage rates have dropped among women who have not graduated from college (quite sharply in the black community), one wonders if we are not seeing validation of a perspective advanced some years ago by Christopher Jencks. Jencks argued that while it has always been harder for the poor than for the rich to make their marriages and families work, they have traditionally made extra efforts to do so--so long as they have received consistent signals from the nation's cultural leaders that such extra efforts are worth it.  When those signals started to become mixed in the late 1960's and 1970's, many of the poor simply stopped making those extra efforts.  So while America's college women are apparently ignoring the anti-marriage rhetoric of their radical professors, that rhetoric is perhaps having a baleful effect on women who never set foot in a college classroom.

(Source: Joshua R. Goldstein and Catherine T. Kenney, "Marriage Delayed or Marriage Forgone? New Cohort Forecasts of First Marriage for U.S. Women," American Sociological Review 66[2001]: 506-519.)