According to a new study from the University of Maryland, the divorce rate in the U.S. has dropped significantly over the last eight years -- largely due to the millennial population.
The study, conducted by UMD sociology professor Philip Cohen, found an 18 percent drop from 2008 to 2016.
Cohen found that while divorce rates remain high among older Americans, the trend in the last decade has been driven by younger Americans. While less of them are marrying, the ones that do choose to tie the knot have lasting marriages. He adds that because of certain demographics, these young Americans have a lower risk of divorce, which may translate to lower divorce rates in the future.
Bloomberg News explains,
New data show younger couples are approaching relationships very differently from baby boomers, who married young, divorced, remarried and so on. Generation X and especially millennials are being pickier about who they marry, tying the knot at older ages when education, careers and finances are on track.
“One of the reasons for the decline is that the married population is getting older and more highly educated,” Cohen told Bloomberg News. “Fewer people are getting married, and those who do are the sort of people who are least likely to get divorced.”
Nowadays, “Marriage is more and more an achievement of status, rather than something that people do regardless of how they’re doing,” he said.
While the divorce rate has decreased, so have marriage rates in general. This is especially prevalent among poorer and less educated Americans, who tend to opt for cohabitation instead, which has shown increasingly unstable over the years.
Cohen summarizes in his study,
There is no doubt that divorce has declined since 2008. Further, although divorce prevalence has continued to rise for women at older ages, the regression models show no increase in adjusted divorce odds at any age. Finally, because divorce rates have continued to fall for younger women, and because the risk profile for newly married couples has shifted toward more protective characteristics (such as higher education, older ages, and lower rates of higher-order marriages), it appears certain that – barring unforeseen changes – divorce rates will further decline in the coming years.
The current decline in divorce, and the coming further decline, is all the more remarkable as cohabitation grows both more normative and less stable, and as attitudes toward divorce continue to grow more permissive.
The professor calculated the findings based on the marital status reported by women to the American Community Survey (ACS), “ an annual survey of about 3.5 million households administered by the U.S. Census Bureau,” The Hill reports.
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