LOOKING FOR MURPHY BROWN: ARE COLLEGE-EDUCATED, SINGLE MOTHERS UNIQUE? Center for Research on Child Wellbeing

In this paper, we study the 20 percent of unmarried mothers in the U.S. who have attended college. We ask whether these women constitute a distinct subgroup of unmarried mothers in terms of their attitudes toward marriage and men, the characteristics of their partners or the age at which they become mothers. We find evidence that being college educated and single is associated with holding more independent views about marriage, with having lower-quality partners and with increased odds of becoming a mother late in life— above and beyond the main effects of education and marital status. We also find variation across race-ethnic groups. White, educated single mothers most closely resemble the image of the “independent woman,” while African-American and Hispanic mothers are more likely to be partnered with less-educated men. INTRODUCTION Non-marital childbearing in the United States is highly stratified by education. Of the more than one million women who give birth out of wedlock annually, only one in five has attended college, and fewer than one in twenty has a college degree (National Center for Health Statistics, 2002). Following this pattern, researchers have focused on the eighty percent of single mothers with a high school education or less and have identified the lack of “marriageable men,” poor economic opportunities for women, and high welfare benefits as the critical factors behind the rise in non-marital childbearing (Wilson & Neckerman, 1986; Ellwood & Jencks, 2001; Moffitt, 2001).