By The Huffington Post News Editors
The value of a college degree may not be what it used to be, from a monetary point of view, but experts have long been touting educational benefits of a different kind — keeping divorce rates low.
A study recently published in the journal Family Relations found that the theory still holds true — with overall divorce rates leveling off since the 1980s after more than a century-long rise — but the rate has increasingly diverged by race and socioeconomic class, when educational attainment is factored in.
In short: Married couples who have attained higher levels of education are less likely to divorce than less-educated couples, but “African-American women don’t seem to enjoy the same degree of protection that education confers on marriage,” said Jeounghee Kim, assistant professor at Rutgers University, where the study was conducted.