[医药卫生]Does a Spouse Slow You Down Marriage and Graduate Student Outcomes.pdf

Does a Spouse Slow You Down?: Marriage and Graduate * Student Outcomes Joseph Price Department of Economics Cornell University Abstract Using data on 11,000 graduate students from 100 departments over a 20 year period, I test whether graduate student outcomes (graduation rates, time to degree, publication success, and initial job placement) differ based on a student’s gender and marital status. I find that married men have better outcomes across every measure than single men. Married women do no worse than single women on any measure and actually have more publishing success and complete their degree in less time. The outcomes of cohabiting students generally fall between those of single and married students. * Contact information: jpp34@cornell.edu This paper has benefited from comments from Ron Ehrenberg, Jeff Groen, George Jakubson, Claire Kamp Dush, Francesca Molinari, and participants at the Mellon Foundation GEI conference and Cornell’s TWIP seminar. Recent demographic trends have shown rapid rise in the age of first marriage (Schoen and Weinick 1993, Cherlin 2005), especially among the highly educated (Goldstein and Kenney 2001). One explanation for the decision to delay marriage among those pursuing a post-gradate degree is that marriage (or having a spouse) will be a hindrance to successful work in graduate school. Even if this is not true for a particular student, he or she may fear the stereotypes that faculty might have towards students who are married and/or have children (Ferreira 2003). This paper uses a dataset of 11,000 graduate studen