Trends in couples’ educational pairings and marital dissolution: Evidence from South Korea

Abstract

This study investigates how heterosexual married couples’ educational pairings – where the wife is more, less, or equally educated compared to her husband – relate to divorce risk and how these patterns have changed over time. While a growing body of research has documented these trends in Western societies, it remains uncertain whether similar patterns exist in non-Western contexts with more traditional gender norms. In addition, little research has differentiated between marriages where both spouses have high levels of education and those where both have low levels of education, as both types of marriages have been classified as educational homogamy. To address these gaps, this study analyzes marriage and divorce registration data to examine changes in couples’ educational pairings and marital dissolution in South Korea between the 1991 and 2018 marriage cohorts. The findings reveal that although female hypogamy used to be associated with a higher divorce risk than hypergamy, this gap has been narrowing and is nearly closed among those married in the 2010s. Moreover, the gap in divorce risk between college-educated and non-college-educated homogamous couples has been widening.