Some remarkable new studies have emerged about the changing patterns of marriage in America.
For decades, it has been assumed that the more educated elites tended towards being more liberal in this and many other ways, while the lower echelons, the less educated with minimal if any college education, are assumed to be more conservative with relation to marriage and anything else.
A strange complexity
For a long time it has been known that this picture has a strange complexity to it: the more educated, while liberal in theory about marriage, actually tend to be pretty conservative about it in their own practice. What’s new, though, is that there is a growing body of evidence that the less educated, whatever their ideological theory, are in practice moving decisively away from long-term marriage commitments. There is more divorce, more out of wedlock birth, less commitment to the institution of marriage.
