Gap in Education and Trends in Marital Dissolution

The decline and eventual reversal of the gen-der gap in education represents a dramatic reversal of a long-standing social gradient in the United States and other countries (OECD 2010). Both men and women complete more schooling now than in the past, but beginning in the mid-1980s, women’s college comple-tion rates began to surpass men’s in the United States (Buchmann and DiPrete 2006). Much of the literature on the reversal focuses on its causes, pointing to the growing disad-vantage of sons with less educated or absent fathers, girls ’ better academic performance in school, and the growing returns to education for women (Buchmann and DiPrete 2006; Charles and Luoh 2003; DiPrete and Buch-mann 2006; Goldin, Katz, and Kuziemko 2006). But the reversal of the gender gap in education also has potentially far-reaching consequences for marriage markets, family formation, and relationship outcomes. One potential consequence of the reversal of the gender gap in education is the growing number of marriages in which wives have more education than their husbands. O