Mate Selection Behavior of GED Recipients

The General Educational Development (GED) degree is designed to be a credential equivalent to the high school diploma. However, growing evidence indicates that GED recipients have worse outcomes than high school graduates. Such findings raise the question: is the GED socially equivalent to the high school diploma? Although educational assortative mating patterns have long been used as a barometer of the social distance across educational groups, there has not been a study that has addressed this question by examining the marital sorting patterns of GED recipients. Using log-linear models, our study shows that the odds of intermarriage between GED recipients and high school graduates resemble those between GED recipients and those without a secondary degree. Racial/ethnic minorities had greater difficulty crossing the GED/high school graduate boundary when they married. Our findings detract from the purported view that the GED degree is equivalent to a traditional high school diploma.

Gender and Educational Differentials in Marital Sorting of Hispanic Young Adults

Over the past few decades, Hispanic young adults have made impressive gains in educational attainment, but improvements have not been even by gender, with Latinas now averaging more schooling than Latinos. These developments in education have implications for Latinx marital sorting behavior and the marriage conditions that they face. Using data from the American Community Survey, we examine intermarriage patterns of Hispanics ages 25 to 34, focusing on gender differences in assortative mating along ethnic and educational lines. We show that college-educated Latinos are less likely than both their lesser-educated peers and college-educated Latinas to marry partners who are less educated than themselves. We also reveal that highly educated Latinas are more likely than Latinos with comparable levels of education to intermarry. We discuss implications for the intergenerational maintenance of Hispanicity as an ethno-race, and for their ability to transmit the socioeconomic gains obtained via educational improvements to future generations of Hispanics.

How Marriage Matters for the Intergenerational Mobility of Family Income: Heterogeneity by Gender, Life Course, and Birth Cohort

Adult children’s labor market status and their type of marriage are major channels through which family advantages are passed from one generation to the next. However, these two routes are seldom studied together. We develop a theoretical approach to incorporate marriage entry and marital sorting into the intergenerational transmission of family income, accounting for differences between sons and daughters and considering education as a central explanatory factor. Using a novel decomposition method applied to data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, we find that marriage plays a major role in intergenerational transmission only among daughters and not until they reach their late-30s. This is more salient in the recent cohort in our data (people born 1963 to 1975). Marital status and marital sorting are comparably important in accounting for the role of marriage, but sorting becomes more important over cohorts. The increasing earnings returns to education over a husband’s career and the weakening association between parental income and daughter’s own earnings explain why marital sorting, and marriage overall, have been growing more important for intergenerational transmission from parents to their daughters.

Intermarriage and the Lifecycle Timing of Migration

We document the relative permeability of ethno-racial boundaries between natives and immigrants who arrived at different stages of their lifecycle. The odds of crossing boundaries involving White spouses are highest among child migrants and lowest among adolescent migrants. By contrast, immigrants who arrive at older ages have lower odds of crossing the Black–Hispanic boundary in marriage. These findings illustrate the importance of the lifecycle timing of migration for marital sorting behavior and immigrant integration.