Modern Marriage in a Traditional Society: The Influence of College Education on Marriage in India

Abstract

India has witnessed a dramatic expansion of higher education, and women have emerged as noteworthy winners in the process. This paper focuses on the role of female college education on four dimensions of marriage: age at marriage, autonomy in the choice of spouse, work and financial empowerment, and quality of marital relationship. The study uses a sample of 35,561 currently married women from the 2011-2012 wave of the nationally representative India Human Development Survey (IHDS). It demonstrates that higher education, particularly college education, enables women to lead lives substantively different from their less-educated peers. College-educated women marry at later ages, enjoy greater autonomy in choosing their husbands, and have a more egalitarian relationship with their spouses. Furthermore, the study finds that educational homogamy and hypogamy afford greater autonomy to women. Even without a concomitant increase in labor force participation, college education among women appears to have a transformative effect on marriage in India.