Study says 60 percent of Black women will marry

(Special to the Trice Edney News Wire from NorthStarNews.com) — The proportion of Black women college graduates 25 to 35 years old who have never married is 60 percent compared to 38 percent for white college-educated women, according to a study published by Brookings.

The study, titled “Single black female BA seeks educated husband: Race, assortative mating (random mating pattern) and inequality,” reports that black women college graduates who do not marry are not assortatively mating since they are not mating—defined as marrying—at all.

“This helps to explain why white women with college degrees are more than twice as likely as their black counterparts to be married to someone of equal or greater educational status,” the report said. The report notes that in 2013, Susan A. Patton, president of Princeton University’s class of 1977, offered the following advice to women students. “Here’s what nobody is telling you.

“Find a husband on campus before you graduate. You will never again be surrounded by this concentration of men worthy of you,” Patton wrote in an article in The Daily Princetonian. Critics called Patton anti-feminist but her basic advice to marry a man “worthy of you” seems to be what most women college graduates are already heeding.

This article originally published in the April 27, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.