The Influence Of Couples Educational Matching On Marriage Quality

With the transformation of economy and society,the traditional Chinese marriage concepts and marriage matching patterns are also changing.It gradually extends from the homogeneity of family socioeconomic status to individual occupational status,income and values,etc.,especially the education,which has both economic and non-economic value,is more and more important in marriage market.Based on this,the study is focused on the impact of educational matching patterns on marital quality,especially in the heterogeneity of family background,whether the educational homogamy has a positive impact on marital quality.In other words,this article aims to reveal the non-economic returns of education from the perspective of marital quality.Based on the data of China Family Panel Studies(CFPS)in 2018,this paper explored the impact of educational matching patterns on marital quality,and conducted from three perspectives: The first part investigated the couples’ educational matching patterns in China and the changing trend.The second part used the ordinary least square and propensity score matching to discuss whether the educational homogamy can improve the marital satisfaction,that is the influence of education on marital quality.The third part built the ordered logistic model to analyze whether the negative effect caused by the family background differences will be weakened when the couple’s education level is the same,which showed the interaction between educational matching and the family background differences.The findings of the study are as follows:First,educational marriage matching in China is mainly based on "homogeneity matching" and "high male and low female" gradient matching,while the law of "low male and high female" educational marriage matching shows a slight upward trend,and there is a phenomenon of education stratification in the marriage market.Second,when controlling for other factors,there is a significant correlation between individual years of education and marriage satisfaction,but individual years of education may have a two-way impact on marriage satisfaction.In general,the higher the degree of educational homogeneity match,the higher the degree of marital satisfaction.Third,there are gender differences in the impact of family background heterogeneity on marriage satisfaction.Women’s family background has a greater impact on marriage satisfaction,while men’s family background has no significant impact on marriage satisfaction,but it will significantly reduce women’s marriage satisfaction.However,the negative effect is reduced when both parties have the same educational level,which means that educational matching moderates the negative effect of family background difference on women’s marriage quality to a certain extent.To sum up,this paper finds that marital education matching degree has an important impact on marital quality,and there is generally a positive correlation between the two.In addition,when there is heterogeneity in family background,educational homogeneity can reduce the negative effect of family background difference on women’s marriage quality.In other words,the degree of marital education match brings some non-monetary benefits to women in terms of marital quality.Therefore,based on their positive impact on the marital quality education matching degree and the government should continue to promote the universality of education development,improving the overall education quality,attaches great importance to the education opportunity to equal gender,guide the decisions of public transition marriage preference,thus improve overall growth and accumulation of human capital to promote social education yields.