American wives are finally better educated than their husbands:
For the first time since Pew Research has tracked this trend over the past 50 years, the share of couples in which the wife is the one “marrying down” educationally is higher than those in which the husband has more education. Among married women in 2012, 21 percent had spouses who were less educated than they were – a threefold increase from 1960, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Census data. The share of couples where the husband’s education exceeds his wife’s increased steadily from 1960 to 1990, but has fallen since then to 20 percent in 2012.
The trend toward wives being more educated than their husbands is even more prevalent among newlyweds, partly because younger women have surpassed men in higher education in the past two decades. In 2012, 27 percent of newlywed women married a spouse whose education level was lower than theirs. By contrast, only 15 percent of newlywed men married a spouse with less education.
Considering how much educational attainment in general has risen over the past 50 years, you could argue record numbers of men are marrying up. But as Kelly Faircloth notes, better-educated women aren’t necessarily better-paid.
The Dish 