“Do Student Loans Delay Marriage?”: Participants, Measures, and Results

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Table of Contents

Literature Review
Hypotheses and Research Questions
Participants
Measures
Results
Discussion
Conclusion
Reference

Literature Review

Bozick and Estacion (2014) refer to journalistic reports from the Wall Street Journal and CNN News, claiming that graduates think about student loan repayment rather than marrying or purchasing a home. In addition, authors refer to researchers who found that economic strain decelerates the decision to marry, for example, Clarkberg, Oppenheimer, Kalmijn, Xie, et cetera.

Hypotheses and Research Questions

The authors hypothesize that “fixed costs associated with marriage” (Bosick & Estacion, 2014, p. 1868). The purpose of this article is to discover:

the relationship between student loan debt and marriage in young adulthood;
whether or not the relationship differs for women and men;
if this relationship becomes weak over time.

Therefore, the article “Do student loans delay marriage?” is aimed at giving exact information with statistics and numbers about three aspects of the relationship between loan debt and the decision to get married.

Participants

The authors examined men and women with post-baccalaureate education as part of the NPSAS data collection. Moreover, researchers obtained data from 1993 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Statistics (NCES). All members included in this study are never married. All members are under 27; people older than 27 are excluded from this study.

Measures

Researchers used several measures: marriage formation, student loan debt, and control variables. Additionally, measures such as career orientation and earning during the first year out of college are included.

Marriage formation. The authors analyzed the time of getting married after earning a bachelor’s degree. The month when a member got married was told by the person.

Student loan debt. The main time-varying measure was student loan debt determined upon monthly payment amounts, the time of graduation, periods of determent, default, and forbearance. This measure does not include scholarships and grants because they do not require repayment.

Control variables, or socio-demographic characteristics. They include age, race/ethnicity, and parental education. In this study, White, Non-Hispanic Black, and Hispanic people are examined.

Results

Bozick and Estacion (2014) discovered that students with loan debt postponed their decision to get married in comparison to their peers who did not have any debt or had a low level of it. For example, 30% of graduates with $4500 debt had married within 48 months after graduating a college, in contrast to graduates with $14 000 debt, where only 11% got married within this period. Likewise, an increase of $1000 of a loan debt reduced by 2% the chance of getting married among women in comparison to men whose loan debt was not important when getting married. In addition, the relationship between the loan debt and the decision to marry is weakening over time, which is true for both women and men.

Discussion

Researchers discovered that student loan debt works like economic strain impeding marrying. The negative relationship is observed among women only and means that constant marriage expenses are more relevant to women’s decision to form a family. This fact questions gender stereotypes about a woman as a homemaker and a man as a breadwinner. In addition, the more adulthood progresses, the less a student loan debt impacts graduates’ decision to marry. Unfortunately, it is unknown whether and how the loan debt influences resource allocation.

Conclusion

Knowing this information, graduates can plan their future exactly and without poor decisions. For example, if a woman has a loan debt, she can focus on her career and decide while studying at college that getting married will be postponed until she pays for the student loan. Additionally, this study demonstrates that gender stereotypes stressing the economic resources of men can be questioned, and gender roles can change.

Reference

Bozick, R., & Estacion, A. (2014). Do student loans delay marriage? Debt repayment and family formation in young adulthood. Demographic Research, 30(69), 1865–1891. Web.

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