Student Loans and Marriage/ "Good husbands" and unwed mothers/ Cohabitation: Like Mother, Like Daughter - 11/05

[Smartmarriages& #174; Mailing List]

- STUDENT LOANS AS IMPEDIMENT TO MARRIAGE
- UNWED MOTHERS HAVE DIFFICULTY FINDING 'GOOD' HUSBANDS, STUDY FINDS
- WOMEN WHO COHABIT HAVE DAUGHTERS WHO DO THE SAME, STUDY SHOWS
 
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- STUDENT LOANS AS AN IMPEDIMENT TO MARRIAGE

Liberals and Conservatives Find Common Ground at a Forum on Student-Loan
Borrowers' Indebtedness
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Nov 17, 2005 
By STEPHEN BURD

Policy makers need to devote more attention to helping student-loan
borrowers with low incomes who have taken on unmanageable levels of debt,
several higher-education researchers and financial-aid experts said at a
conference here on Wednesday about problems related to student indebtedness.

. . .  "Here is an effort in which conservatives and liberals are both
asking whether there are problems with rising student debt, and if there
are, how we might address them," he said.

. . . Ms. Draut, whose book Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings
Can't Get Ahead is scheduled to be published in January by Doubleday, noted
that the median earnings of 25- to 34-year-olds have generally fallen over
the past 30 years, while housing prices in major metropolitan areas have
soared. As a result, she said, high levels of indebtedness are making it
more difficult for student-loan borrowers to pursue public-service careers,
such as teaching, to seek graduate degrees, and to save money for the
future.

A speaker on the conservative side had similarly dire warnings. Allan
Carlson, president of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society, a
nonprofit research institute in Rockford, Ill., said that the rising level
of indebtedness is harmful to society because student-loan borrowers are ARE
MORE LIKELY TO PUT OFF MARRIAGE AND HAVING CHILDREN.

Noting studies that have correlated more education with having fewer
children, Mr. Carlson called student loans "a highly effective form of
contraception."

"The anti-marriage and anti-natal effects of student-loan debt are the
consequences of poorly conceived public policy," he said. "Accordingly,
policy makers face a special moral imperative to set things right."

As an example, he proposed that Congress use student-loan forgiveness as an
incentive for child bearing. Under his plan, for every child born to or
adopted by married parents, the federal government would pay off one-fourth
of their outstanding student debt, up to $5,000 each for the mother and the
father. Families that had four children could erase as much as $20,000 per
parent, he said.

To read the full article, visit:
http://chronicle.com/temp/email.php?id=hb301lnrv9cz46w39kzt2rtpxaznqk2b
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- UNWED MOTHERS HAVE DIFFICULTY FINDING 'GOOD' HUSBANDS, STUDY FINDS
OSU News Research Archive
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/marrpros.htm

COLUMBUS, Ohio ­ Women who have children outside of marriage are less likely
than other single women to marry, and when they do marry, their husbands
tend to be less well-matched, according to a new study.
Zhenchao Qian

The results show that the odds that unwed mothers marry rather than cohabit
are about 30 percent lower than those of childless single women.

When they do marry, mothers are more likely to have husbands who are
significantly older and less educated than those of childless women.

³It's more difficult for unwed mothers to get married, and if they do, they
tend to not marry well,² said Zhenchao Qian, co-author of the study and
associate professor of sociology at Ohio State University.

The results suggest that efforts by the federal government and states to
promote marriage among young, poor Americans NEED TO DO MORE TO PREVENT
OUT-OF-WEDLOCK CHILDBEARING, Qian said. He conducted the study with Leanna
Mellott, graduate student in sociology at Ohio State, and Daniel Lichter,
professor at Cornell University .

Their results appear in the current issue of the journal Social Forces.

They used data collected in the Current Population Survey (June supplements)
between 1980 and 1995. Their final sample included 102,722 women aged 18 to
34.

Programs such as the federal Healthy Marriage Initiative may be helpful, but
only if they tackle the issue of out-of-wedlock childbearing and address the
economic disadvantages of these women and their potential partners.

The data indicated that among never-married mothers slightly more than half
-- 55.8 percent ­ were black, while about 10.3 percent are Hispanic.

Unwed mothers are disadvantaged economically, Qian said. They are far more
likely to live below the poverty line than married women. Over one-third of
female-headed families with children live in poverty compared to only 6
percent of married couples with children. However, marriage for unwed
mothers may not help them economically if partners lack education and other
important qualities, he said.

³Unwed mothers have significant disadvantages when trying to attract
suitable mates,² Mellott said. ³As a result, single mothers are less likely
than childless women to be well matched demographically with their husbands
or partners.²

For example, the study showed that single mothers were less likely than
childless women to marry a man with at least some college education. That
suggests unwed mothers are unlikely to improve their economic prospects
through marriage, she said, because potential husbands are less likely to
have opportunities for good-paying jobs.

In addition, a white woman who had children outside of marriage was more
likely to marry a man who was significantly older ­ at least six years older
­ than she. That wasn't the case for Black and Hispanic women, but only
because they were less likely than whites to be married at all, Qian said.

³Our analysis suggests that Blacks and Hispanics may be less likely to marry
or cohabit because they face shortages of potential spouses,² he said. ³If
they had been married or living with someone, they would likely have
husbands or partners much older than themselves.²

Overall, the results show that ³women who bear children out of wedlock do
not fare well in the marriage market,² Lichter said.

As a result, federal and state governments need to consider carefully how
they craft marriage promotion programs, Lichter said. President Bush
launched the Healthy Marriage Initiative in 2002 to help promote marriage
among low-income Americans. In June, President Bush announced a budget
request for 2006 which proposed $100 million in matching funds for states
and tribes to develop innovative healthy marriage programs, and another $100
million to fund technical assistance and research as well as demonstrations
targeted to family formation and healthy marriage.

Such programs may be helpful, but only if they tackle the issue of
out-of-wedlock childbearing and address the economic disadvantages of these
women and their potential partners, according to Qian.

³Most unwed mothers want to have a satisfying marriage and family, but have
significant obstacles to finding a good mate,² he said.

³Government efforts to reduce out-of-wedlock childbearing and provide
employment and education opportunities for low-income men and women may have
the indirect and long-term benefit of encouraging better matched and
therefore more healthy and stable marriages.²

Contact: Zhenchao Qian, (614) 688-8612; Qian.26 at osu.edu

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WOMEN WHO COHABIT HAVE DAUGHTERS WHO DO THE SAME, STUDY SHOWS
OSU News Research Archive
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/cohabcld.htm

COLUMBUS , Ohio ­ When it comes to living together with a man, daughters
often follow the lead of their mothers, according to a new study.

Research showed that young adult women whose mothers reported cohabitation
were 57 percent more likely than other women to report cohabitation
themselves. In addition, daughters of cohabiting mothers tended to cohabit
at earlier ages than others.

³Women tend to model the behavior of their mothers when it comes to
relationships,² said Leanna Mellott, co-author of the study and a graduate
student in sociology at Ohio State University.

Mellott described this study as just the first step in trying to determine
how living together outside marriage may affect children who grow up in such
an environment. ³We need to further study both the number and type of
relationship transitions ­ such as divorce or cohabiting ­ for mothers and
their children,² Mellott said.

The likelihood that sons would cohabit was not affected by whether their
mothers lived with a man outside marriage, but there were other effects:
sons were more likely to cohabit if their mothers were divorced or had their
first child at an early age.

While there has been a lot of research on how divorce affects children, this
is one of few studies on the impact of cohabitation, said Zhenchao Qian,
another co-author and associate professor of sociology at Ohio State .

More than one-third of all births in the United States in 2003 were to
unmarried women.

³As more people enter into cohabiting relationships and have children, we
have to recognize that this could have long-term effects on these children
as they enter adulthood,² Qian said.

Mellott presented the team's findings Aug. 16 in Philadelphia at the annual
meeting of the American Sociological Association. Mellott and Qian conducted
the study with Daniel Lichter, a former Ohio State professor now at Cornell
University .

Data for the study came from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a
nationally representative survey of people nationwide conducted by Ohio
State 's Center for Human Resource Research. Men and women aged 14 to 22 in
1979 were interviewed annually from 1979 to 1994, and once every two years
from 1996 forward. The NLSY also interviewed these participants' children.

This study included data on women in the NLSY who had children who were at
least 18 years old by 2000. There were 2,426 of these young adults in this
study.

Mellott said that the mothers in this study were not representative of all
mothers, because they had children at a relatively young age. In addition,
this NLSY sample includes more minorities than the general population.

Still, the researchers noted that the strong effects of cohabitation on
adult children were consistent, even after taking into account factors such
as race, education, and poverty, which all have their own strong links to
cohabitation.

Other results of the study showed that young Black men were about 35 percent
less likely than white men to report cohabitation, while Black women were 90
percent less likely to have cohabited than their white counterparts.

Education was another important factor, with higher levels of schooling
consistently linked to lower levels of living together outside of marriage.

While religion itself was not linked to cohabitation, people who attended
religious services weekly were much less likely to live together than those
who attended rarely or never.

Young adults' relationships were also affected by the stability of their
mothers' relationships, the study showed.

Each relationship transition for the mothers ­ including divorce, widowhood
or new cohabitation -- increased the likelihood of cohabitation by 32
percent for their sons, and 42 percent for their daughters.

Mellott described this study as just the first step in trying to determine
how living together outside marriage may affect children who grow up in such
an environment.

³We need to further study both the number and type of relationship
transitions ­ such as divorce or cohabiting ­ for mothers and their
children,² she said.

³There's been much discussion in society about healthy marriages and how to
promote them, but we really need to know more about how these concepts are
passed from generation to generation.²

This study was supported in part by a grant from the National Institute of
Child Health and Human Development.

Contact: Leanna Mellott, (614) 688-5835; Mellott.19 at osu.edu
Zhenchao Qian, (614) 688-8612; Qian.26 at osu.edu


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