Educational Attainment and the Transition to First Marriage among Japanese Women

I use data from a large nationally representative survey to examine the relationship between women's educational attainment and the timing of first marriage in Japan.The results indicate that later marriage for highly educated women primarily reflects longer enrollment in school, that university education is increasingly associated with later and less marriage, and that the trend toward later and less marriage is occurring at all levels of educational attainment.These findings are consistent, albeit weakly, with the argument that higher education should be negatively associated with marriage only in countries in which gender relations make it particularly difficult for women to balance work and family.n studies of women's transition to first marriage, educational attainment has long been used as an indicator of economic resources (e.g., Preston and Richards 1975;Sweeney 2002;Thornton, Axinn, and Teachman 1995).In recent work, this use of educational attainment as a proxy for economic resources has played an important role in the evaluation of alternative theoretical explanations for trends in the timing of first marriage in the United States and other industrialized countries.Specifically, it has been argued that a careful evaluation of whether women's higher educational attainment is associated primarily with later marriage or with less marriage may provide some empirical leverage in distinguishing between theoretical explanations that emphasize reductions in the gains to marriage and those that emphasize increasing economic uncertainty at young ages.On the one hand, evidence that higher education is associated with an increased likelihood of never marrying may be consistent with reductions in the gains to marriage that prompt economically independent women to "buy out" of marriage.On the other hand, evidence that higher education is associated with later, but not necessarily less, marriage may be more consistent with a scenario in which the spouse-search process becomes longer as men's and women's economic roles become more similar.Because future earnings prospects are much more uncertain at young ages than are characteristics such as appearance, personality, and family background, an increase in the importance of women's economic prospects as a spouse-selection criterion may contribute to later marriage by decreasing the certainty with which the relevant characteristics of potential spouses can be evaluated (Oppenheimer 1988(Oppenheimer , 1994(Oppenheimer , 1997)).Empirical evidence from analyses of U.S. data, however, does not provide strong support for either of these explanations.In fact, most studies of individual-level data have found that, net of the marriage-delaying effect of school enrollment, educational attainment is either positively or not significantly associated with the risk of first marriage for women (e.g., Lichter et al. 1992;Oppenheimer and Lew 1995;Sweeney 2002;Thornton et al. 1995).An intriguing framework for understanding this general pattern of findings for women in the United States is provided by Blossfeld's (1995a) interpretation of results