MR. KOJO NNAMDIFrom WAMU 88.5 at American University in Washington, welcome to "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," connecting your neighborhood with the world. Mention traditional family values and most of us picture middle class Americans with strong religious affiliations and strong marriages. But a new report on the state of marriage in America says we may have our culture war stereotypes backwards. It turns out that people who are college educated are far more likely than their less educated peers not only to be married, but to embrace the values that go along with a traditional family structure.

MR. KOJO NNAMDILiving in an intact married family boosts the prospects for success in school and work for both adults and children. But while pundits argue over what marriage should mean, it seems that a growing number of Americans are abandoning the institution altogether. As the demographics of marriage shift across the country, how will that impact the public discourse and the direction of American civic life? Joining us to have this conversation is Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project. He's also a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. Bradford Wilcox, thank you for joining us.

MR. W. BRADFORD WILCOXIt's good to be here, Kojo.

NNAMDIAlso with us is Ross Douthat. He's a columnist with the New York Times. Ross Douthat, thank you for joining us.

MR. ROSS DOUTHATThanks for having me, Kojo.

NNAMDIIt's a conversation that we are sure a lot of you will be interested in joining. So you can start calling now, 800-433-8850. As in, what in the heck are you people talking about anyway? 800-433-8850. You can also go to our website, kojoshow.org and ask questions there. In response to the what in the heck are we talking about, Brad, the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia released a report last month called "When Marriage Disappears." In it, you conclude that marriage is floundering among the people who make up the broad middle of our society. Explain how you define that middle according to educational level.

WILCOXKojo, we look at folks who are high school educated and they -- 58 percent of the American adult population, about 30 percent is college educated and about 12 percent are high school drop-outs. That middle group is that 58 percent of Americans who are high school educated.

NNAMDIFlush out that 58 percent of the nation's adults aged 25 to 60 who fall into this moderately educated middle, people who have graduated high school, but who have not graduated (unintelligible) college. Who are they? Where do they work? Where do they live?

WILCOXWell, you know, some of them of course have gotten vocational training, some of them gotten some, you know, degree of college education, but haven't gotten that BA. But they work in any number of industries from, you know, health care assistants or nurses -- I mean, nursing assistants. They work in the service industry, whether it's for FedEx or something else like that, and they can be found oftentimes in the outer suburbs, as well as in rural America and small town America. They're more likely to be kind of in those three regions as we look at the United States.

NNAMDIThat's the broad middle, 58 percent. What are the marriage trends for people on those two levels of the education spectrum, those with college degrees and the 58 percent in the broad middle who don't have college degrees?

WILCOXWell, you know, the good news in this report is that those who are college educated are actually seeing their marriages become more stable. Their marriages are also maintaining a high level of marital quality and their kids are more likely now to grow up with both married mom and dad now as compared to 20 or 30 years ago. So for this particular group of college educated Americans, we're seeing better trends. But for this middle group, this high school educated group, we're seeing more divorce. We're seeing more non-marital child bearing and we're seeing fewer kids growing up with their married mother and father. So, it's a pretty different pattern that we're seeing across these two different groups.

NNAMDIRoss, we've known for a long time that there's a marriage gap in this country, but this study seems to say there's a different evolving twist on that gap. How do you interpret it?

DOUTHATWell, for a long time, there's been an idea that there's a paradox in what we think of as the American culture war, right, the debate over marriage, family, everything from premarital sex to gay marriage. And the paradox has been conceived of as the idea that well-educated Americans are more likely to be socially liberal in their personal beliefs, but more likely to live, just as Brad says, sort of socially conservatively, more likely to be -- more likely to save child bearing for marriage, less likely to get divorced and so on. Whereas what Brad calls the moderately educated middle where more socially conservative in their politics and values, but then more likely to live in disrupted families, to have children out of wedlock, to get divorced in higher rates and so on.

DOUTHATSo that's the baseline paradox. But what some of the data in Brad's excellent study suggest is that this paradox isn't as much of a paradox anymore, that actually college educated Americans are either becoming at least somewhat more conservative in their values. So -- and meanwhile, the moderately educated middle is becoming somewhat less religious than they used to be and somewhat less socially conservative. So, a couple data points that jump out, it used to be, I believe, that sort of middle Americans were more likely to think that divorce was too easy to get. And college-educated Americans were more likely to support no-fault divorce laws basically to support the liberalization of divorce laws.

DOUTHATNow that gap has closed and we've reached a point where college-educated Americans are actually evenly divided when you ask should divorce be made harder to get. So they've become more conservative on divorce than they used to be. Then, if you look at religious observants, again, it used to be -- and by used to be, I mean, the 1970s, that college-educated Americans were less likely to be in church. So it wasn't -- these weren't huge gaps, but slightly less likely to be in church than the rest of the country on Sunday.

DOUTHATNow, actually, church going rates have gone down somewhat for everyone, but they've gone down the most for high school dropouts and people with high school degrees. So now, actually college-educated Americans, defying some of these stereotypes, on a given Sunday are more likely to be in church than other American groups.

NNAMDIBut one aspect of this, Bradford Wilcox, is who is college educated these days because we tended to associate blue collar Americans with so-called traditional and family values. That's something we also associated evangelical Americans with. What we're discovering, according to this study, is evangelical Americans are going to college even more and are therefore more of them college educated.

WILCOXThat's a great point, Kojo. I mean, I think that's sort of the factors behind these new trends is the sort of the number of people who are getting college educated in the U.S. has increased and the diversity both in terms of race, ethnicity and religion is also greater now among college-educated Americans. So one thing that we're seeing I think here in the data and that's reflected in increasing shifts on divorce and on attitude towards premarital sex is that there are more evangelical, more religious folks in this college-educated group and that helps to explain some of what we're seeing in the data, Kojo.

NNAMDIWhy do you think a college education makes people better or makes people better at being married? I'd like to hear both of you on this. First you, Bradford.

WILCOXWell, you know, I think one thing that helps to do is to give people a leg up in this economy. What we've seen in the last 40 years is that Americans, particularly men who are college educated have continued to see their real incomes increase. They make, you know, good marriage partners from an economic perspective. But from the perspective of the relationship, college-educated Americans have a set of social skills that they can bring to the marriage that allows them to kind of realize what's become kind of a soul mate model of marriage in our day and age. That's two points. The final point that I would make is that this is a kind of a selection story in part and that is that the kinds of people nowadays who are getting college educated tend to be somewhat more responsible. They tend to work harder and they have the kinds of broad personality traits, if you will, that will make them better spouses.

NNAMDIBefore Ross Douthat responds, what is the soul mate model of marriage?

WILCOXSo what I argue in the report is that we saw, you know, about 40 years ago and before that kind of an institutional model of marriage, where people are more likely to associate marriage with establishing a residence together, having kids together, you know, getting launched in a job, becoming close to kin, et cetera. Lots of different things besides just the close personal couple relationship. Whereas today, the soul mate model is more about having an intense, you know, expressive emotional friendship between two persons. And these other things are less important. The problem with the soul mate model of marriage is that it's less accessible to working class and poor Americans because it many more stresses, you know, whether it's missing, you know, the rent, having difficulties with unemployment or things like that to make this kind of more friendship oriented model of marriage, more difficult to achieve and to sustain in their lives.

NNAMDIWhat do you think, Ross Douthat, why are college educated people making a better go of marriages?

DOUTHATI think part of it -- and I agree with basically everything Brad just said -- but I think part of what's driving it too is that the kind of people who go to college because they have a sort of a life plan that includes college and then often includes maybe the idea of graduate studies and so on, these are people who have -- tend to have longer time horizons and thus end up having an easier time delaying either parenthood or marriage or both. So what you see I think a lot in middle America now is, on the one hand, you have populations where people, there's been a complete cleavage between marriage and child rearing. So people, you know, they think of marriage as a separate thing from the act of bringing a child into the world.

DOUTHATAnd so if you have a child at, let's say, 20, 21, especially if you have a child before you're married, you're going to be less likely to graduate from college. But if you aren't thinking about sort of college and this kind of career trajectory, you're more likely to have that child in the first place, because obviously, you know, children are important. People want to have children and that becomes a kind of a life milestone. But then having that happen earlier or having an early marriage, which is then more likely to lead to a divorce, then makes college less likely. So I'm sort getting tangled here. But I think the tangle reflects the fact that there is a feedback loop. So it's not that college educated people are more likely to get married or that married people to have graduated from college, it's both things going on at the same time.

NNAMDIWe're talking with Ross Douthat. He is a columnist with the New York Times. And Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project. He's also a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia. We're talking about the evolving institution of marriage in America and why people with college education seem to be making a better go of marriage than people without. Inviting your calls, what do you think about all of this? 800-433-8850. Is your marriage similar to or very different from the model of marriage that you grew up with? 800-433-8850 or send us an e-mail to kojo@wamu.org. Here is Worris (ph) in Glen Burnie, Md. Worris, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

WORRISYeah, hi. My name is Worris. And first of all, thank you guys for bringing up this very, very issue, which we are struggling as a social group in the U.S. I'm originally from upstate New York and I saw a lot of families who are divorced or didn't have parents, kids and they were going through a very hard time. And I experienced this over the years. I think without marriage and without parents, then without mother in the model, we will be -- kids will be lost and will be very struggling as a social group.

WORRISAnd to find a solution for this -- and I hope you guys agree with me and I think your comments are more important. The social institutions, such as the religious institutions, whether it's Judaism, Islam or Christianity, they have very old -- they are very old institutions and they have very good models for supporting families. Do you guys agree with that that we should approach them and get help from religious institutions...

NNAMDIWell, Worris, I don't know if they agree with that or not. But one of the interesting findings here in the study conducted by the National Marriage Project, Bradford Wilcox, is that people with college educations now seem to go to church more than people who don't have college educations.

WILCOXThat's right, Kojo. So we saw back in the 1970s about 40 percent of both college-educated and high school-educated folks were attending religious services about once a week more than that. Whereas today, 34 percent of college-educated Americans are regular religious attendees and only 28 percent of Americans who've got a high school degree are attending services regularly. So one of the challenges to respond to Juarez' comments is that, I think, many of the potential target audience, you know, if you will, for this group are not in church on any given Sunday.

WILCOXAnd so, I think, one challenge facing (unintelligible) is how do we do a better job of reaching out to people in middle America to make the religious life of our local congregation more attractive for them?

NNAMDIRoss?

DOUTHATAnd I would add, I think, Juarez is absolutely right about the big picture. I think if you look historically at -- and this is particularly true of immigrant populations in the United States, the role that institutional religion and, in many cases, the institutional Catholic church played in sort of furthering stable community life and stable family life, I think, shouldn't be underestimated. I think if you look today at places -- communities where marriage is weakest in the United States, it's often among recent immigrant and particularly recent Hispanic immigrants.

DOUTHATHispanics have one of the higher rates of out of wedlock births, overall. And, I think, that reflects the fact that, you know, institutional religion, in general, institutional Catholicism in particular, which tends to be the default religion for a lot of recent immigrants, is weaker than it used to be. And I think Brad's absolutely right, that ultimately these kind of sort of community building institutions need to do a better job of building community in middle America among recent immigrants and so on.

NNAMDII wanted to raise a question about that, but we have to take a break. And when we come back, I will raise that question. And that is, the Hispanic community has a very strong Catholic base in the United States so one wonders why that community would be experiencing increasing numbers of children born out of wedlock. But that will have to wait. In the meantime, you can also call 800-433-8850 or go to our website, kojoshow.org. Join the conversation on the evolving institution of marriage. Share your thoughts, questions or comments. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWelcome back, we're discussing a recent study by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia indicating that Americans with college degrees tend to stay in marriage longer, make a better go of it than Americans who do not. Along with a few other notable findings of that study, including the Americans who go to church more often than not and more. We're talking with Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project. He's also a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.

NNAMDIAnd Ross Douthat is a columnist with the New York Times. And joining us now by telephone is Ruy Teixeira. He is a joint fellow with the Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation. He's co-author of, "The Emerging Democratic Majority." Ruy Teixeira, thank you for joining us.

MR. RUY TEIXEIRAGlad to be here.

NNAMDIRuy, I'm glad you're joining us as we go back to the issue that we were talking about earlier that Brad raised and Ross was talking about, the Hispanic community and the fact that there's a high rate of out of wedlock birth there. Ross, I was saying before the break that it seems that with the strong Catholic base in the Hispanic community, that would not be occurring. But apparently, the education levels speak more than the religious base in this particular case.

DOUTHATYeah, I think part of what you're seeing in the Hispanic community -- and this is, I think, particularly true -- and Brad can correct me if I'm getting any of the numbers wrong. But in second and third generation, Hispanics, as you see in a simulation to working class and even under class American norms and that, in the end, it seems like the impact of American culture at large is stronger, much stronger, in fact, then sort of the hold of traditional Catholicism on these populations.

DOUTHATBut I do think it is, you know, those kind of numbers are in part an indictment of the institutional Catholic church in the United States, which has, to some extent, I think, failed in its obligations to be a force for a stability in a simulation in the lives of recent immigrants. I mean -- and I'm a Catholic myself so I don't want to -- you know, they're obviously churches doing wonderful and important things and people making a huge effort.

DOUTHATBut I think one interesting wrinkle, too, is that if you look at -- again, Brad will correct me if I'm wrong about this. But if you look at Hispanics who are converts to Protestantism and particularly to -- there's a large and growing Pentecostal Hispanic community. Those tend to be more upwardly mobile and, I believe, have more stable family lives, which suggest that, you know, this sort of broad culture of traditional Catholicism isn't filling that void, but other, perhaps, Protestant churches sometimes are.

NNAMDIBrad, you can either affirm or correct Ross if he's wrong.

WILCOXNo, I think Ross is largely right. And I think the point is that many immigrants come oftentimes from Mexico, rural Mexico, with fairly traditional values. And they work hard and they actually have low divorce rates and pretty high levels of marital fertility. But their kids and their kids' kids often don't do well, in part, because they're living in poor communities where they're exposed more and more to kind of what you see as the underclass in American life.

WILCOXSo there's this whole phenomena of downward mobility that we see in the literature where a lot of these kids, second, third generation Hispanics, are not doing well on a variety of fronts, including on the whole family related front.

NNAMDIRuy Teixeira, what do you make of all of this?

TEIXEIRAWell, I guess I got a couple of comments. One would be that I think all of the data in this report -- and of course, there's lots of other data along these lines, kind of underscores something I've written about quite a bit in the past. And I put out a report in the last year called "Coming into the Culture Wars," which suggests that a lot of the traditional, nontraditional morality kind of issues that seem so politically pertinent and cutting so heavily in American politics, I think are really going to die out over time and already are dying out.

TEIXEIRAThat those aren't the real divisions and debates about policy that are important. They're not really what -- or keeping people apart. You know, we're just -- the whole country is evolving in a nontraditional way and it cuts across class and race. And these aren't going to be the voting issues. These aren't going to be the really salient issues. Over time, it's going to be other things. So if we're evolving in a nontraditional way, where nontraditional family forms are increasingly common, well, what can we do about that?

TEIXEIRAWhat do we have to address? What are the real issues? And it seems to me, the real issues have to do with how actual people live their actual lives, whatever their family form might be. And I actually think that even if you're -- and you could make a pretty good case that marriage compared to the alternative -- a stable marriage is a pretty good idea if you want to make it more likely that people are going to form what you might call traditional marriages.

TEIXEIRAYou want to do, roughly, the same things that we need to do to make it easier for people who are not in traditional marriages, which is, you've got to improve things like childcare, after school care. You've got to make it easier for people to get reasonably good jobs that pay a relatively good wage with benefits. I mean, as is expressed at the end of the National Marriage Projects' report, one big problem is that people in this middle educational group, they have a hard time getting good jobs. So this causes a lot of stress. I mean, the poorer you are and the more shakier your finances, the more difficult your course through life, the more vexed your avenue to upward mobility, the more difficult it is for you to just keep it together. (unintelligible) ...

NNAMDISo you're saying, Ruy that the relation...

TEIXEIRA...are having a hard time keeping it together. So we want to make it easier for people to keep it together and to lead stable lives with a relatively steady income and good upward mobility prospects. And these are the kinds of things that will both make it easier and better for people who aren't in traditional marriages and for people who are interested to form them and keep them. So, I think, the two things go together.

NNAMDISo you're saying, Ruy, that the relationship we should be making is between -- or we should be making is between education and income and not a relationship between education and choices that people make?

TEIXEIRAYes, but I think we should look at that very carefully. Why is it that college educated people are having...

NNAMDIOkay.

TEIXEIRA...an easier time keeping marriages together?

NNAMDIOkay. There's one...

TEIXEIRAIt's because they just got different attitudes towards life or it's because their lives are in fact different? And I would argue their lives are in fact different. If you look at the economic data from the last 30 and 40 years, it's clear that the one group in society that has fared the best in terms of keeping their act together economically and having rising income...

NNAMDIIt's college educated people.

TEIXEIRA... (unintelligible) it's people who are college educated.

NNAMDIWanted to move onto another issue...

TEIXEIRA(unintelligible) not have a lot of difficulty.

NNAMDIWanted to move to another issue before we go to the telephones. And there are a lot of you calling and the lines are busy. Go to our website, kojoshow.org, ask your question there or send us a tweet at kojoshow. This comment was pasted on our website by Coqui. "I think you missed someone in your categories. As far as I know, the least likely to marry is the educated black woman. With a BA or a BS, her chances are already less than most other members of the population to marry. Let her obtain a doctoral degree particularly in the sciences or law degree and she will probably not ever marry.

NNAMDISo what you mean by educated depends on what level of education you mean. These women may or may not be elites, but they are certainly educated and often are the least likely to marry." Brad, is there a racial component to the trend away from marriage in that broad middle or otherwise?

WILCOXKojo, there is a racial trend. And, of course, we've been talking about this issue of race and marriage at least since the controversial release of the Moynihan report back in 1960s. But what's interesting about our work on this report is that we find that sort of the stratification, if you will, is also found in the black community. And according to my data, college-educated African Americans -- and I don't break it up by men and women, but they're actually more likely to be intact marriage than their less educated piers.

WILCOXSo even in a black community in general, we see, is that college educated African Americans are doing better and their kids are more likely to be growing up with their married mother and father. So the point is that college is now kind of a dividing line, not just for whites, but for both African Americans and other Americans.

NNAMDILet's go to the telephones. Here is Patricia in Silver Spring, Md. Patricia, go ahead, please.

PATRICIAKojo, great show. Hope you can hear me okay.

NNAMDIWe can.

PATRICIAWell, I'm one of those educated African American woman, MBA, never been married. Two questions. The data that your gentlemen are referring to, is it across the country? How many people did he interview for this study? Because I'm always concerned about numbers and population. And the other thing, my parents who were married, like, in the '40s -- that gives you an idea, I'm in my 50s now. But those are the people, I think, who really stay married. And they were elementary school educated. So speak to those, too, if you could. Thanks so much for hearing me.

NNAMDIPatricia says her blue collar parents are the people who used to stay together. And she'd like to know the scope of the study.

WILCOXSo we look at three different large national data sets involving thousands of Americans across the U.S. I mean, 52,000 in one data set, 71,000 in different set and 15,000. So we're getting, I think, a pretty good picture of what's happening in the country as a whole. But I think her point about kind of history is instructive because what comes out in the report is that working class Americans, you know, priory to 1970s did a fairly good job when it came to this whole issue of marriage and family life.

WILCOXIt's only been since then that this sort of class divide is really emerged with a vengeance. And it's, you know, I think, suggestive. Both of the kinds of economic shifts that were present, but also the cultural and civic shifts that this report touches on as well.

NNAMDICare to comment on that, Ross?

DOUTHATWell, one thing that actually Brads report didn't look into that I think would be very interesting is doing a break down within the college educated community. Because, obviously, I mean, as Brad says, you're dealing with huge samples and sort of broad swaths of the American population. But I would be very interested to know if, for instance, there's a difference between the marriage rates for black women who just have a college degree and black women who have a professional degree. Or again, we started this show talking about sort of values issues and how the college educated, now more likely to be in church.

DOUTHATI wonder if people with a college degree, but no PhD, might be more like -- I mean, actually I don't wonder. I know. But I think that one of the interesting things in American life now is that you have -- you know, we're generalizing here about the college educated, but you do have these fracturings (sp?) within the college educated where, you know, college educated people in Alabama are more socially conservative than college educated people in Connecticut and so on so...

NNAMDIWell, Ruy Teixeira, that raises an interesting question for me. And that is, for a long time, and, Ross, you might want to weigh in on this also, the nation's culture war extensively pitted educated secular social liberals against less educated, more religious cultural conservatives. Is the real divide actually between different factions of the educated class, Ruy Teixeira?

TEIXEIRAWell, actually, I don't believe that's the case. I don't think there is actually a big culture war within the college educated. I don't think we're likely to see one. I think the culture war, such as it is, is no longer really a culture war, even though it's culturally pinged. I think it's an argument about and among people in this middle education group, which includes, you know, what we would really call the white working class, about how they can get ahead, how they can make their way in this sort of new economy and this new America that's been so difficult for them.

TEIXEIRAAnd that's become very culturally pinged. I mean, look at the way the republicans ran in 2010. There was a real cultural overlay to the arguments they had about government and how government was spending money too much and in the wrong way and irresponsibly. And it wasn't going to go to people like you. And, you know, the bureaucrats in Washington and people like Obama, they don't understand people like you. They're elites. They're not people like you. That's the populist kind of argument. It does have a cultural overlay and that -- paradoxically, I think, the culture war today is not about culture.

TEIXEIRAIt's about who can really help the situation of these people in the middle. And, you know, that's the fight we're really having. And the cultural stuff kind of swirls around that. But we're no longer really arguing about marriage. And soon we'll be arguing about gay marriage. We'll be arguing -- and maybe this is a good thing, about how you can actually help the people in the middle lead decent lives, the kinds of lives that people who are college educated are able to lead. So we need to improve that situation of the people who lack a college education. And I might add, we probably want to make it easier for people to go to college and get a four-year college degree.

TEIXEIRAThe supply of four-year college graduates in this country has flattened out at a very time in which, arguably, the demand for it will continue to increase.

NNAMDIWell, Ross Douthat, back to the...

TEIXEIRA(unintelligible) thing.

NNAMDI...back to the cultural war question for a second because it occurs to me that Nancy Pelosi has a college degree. Sarah Palin has a college degree. Yet, they're at war culturally.

DOUTHATRight. I mean, I sort of half agree with Ruy. I think that -- I mean, at the moment, we're living through a period of massive economic dislocation where sort of explicitly cultural debates have been trumped by what I think he rightly describes as sort of culturally tinged economic arguments or economically inflected cultural arguments and so on. I do think, though, that there is a sense, and I think this is particularly true as we were saying earlier, as evangelical Christians, in particular, have become better educated in which you do have a division.

DOUTHATYou know, if you define educated America broadly enough, you have a division between people who went to BYU and people who went to Yale, or people who went to Wheaton College and people who went to Swarthmore, or people who went to Old Miss versus people who went to UMASS, I think, and this divide reflects geographic differences, religious differences and so on. But, I mean, one of the interesting things, and this goes back into the Bush era and beyond, is that when you break down voting patterns, I believe, by state and by region, what you see is that in most states and regions, in blue states, education correlates more with voting for democrats.

DOUTHATAnd in red states, it doesn't. Educated voters are more likely to vote overall for republicans. Now, I think there...

TEIXEIRANow, see, that's not true.

DOUTHATThat's not -- isn't that the Gilman?

TEIXEIRANo, that's not...

DOUTHATIsn't that the...

NNAMDIOkay.

TEIXEIRANo, that's not true. I mean, it depends on which kind of red state you're talking about.

DOUTHATWell, that's true, yeah.

TEIXEIRAIt's a deep, deep red state. So, I mean, there's not much going on. You get, you know, toward anything that's even vaguely purple and, you know, but still red, you tend to see a real difference between white college graduates and white working class voters. It is true that in the deep south you don't see that.

DOUTHATRight.

TEIXEIRAIn Utah -- well, actually, Utah, you do see a little bit. But anyway, I'm just saying, it's not quite...

DOUTHATYou mean -- well, and there's also the difference.

NNAMDIOkay.

DOUTHATYeah, sorry, we're getting into the...

NNAMDIHey, I want to get back to marriage again for a second. Here is...

TEIXEIRAOkay, back to marriage.

NNAMDI...Laura, in Annapolis, Md. Laura, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

LAURAOh, yes. I've enjoyed your conversation. My husband and I both have post-graduate degrees. When we got married we said, when it's no longer fun, we won't stay married. But as we had children, we've been married 11 years now, had our problems, and find that we're more committed than ever. Still have problems, and in marriage counseling currently, but divorce is really not an option for us due our dysfunctional backgrounds that we came from. We want better for our children, and we want better for ourselves.

NNAMDIAre you suggesting, Laura, that it's no longer fun?

LAURAOh, there were times. There were definitely times where I definitely looked up divorce law, yes.

NNAMDIWell, I'd like to add to that an e-mail we got from Dianne who said, "Is there any information about the extent of which married people included in the study availed themselves of counseling services during the course of their marriage? I am in the more than college educated group," like Laura, "and it seems that virtually every married couple I know has sought individual or couples counseling when they have hit rocky patches in their marriage or their lives.

NNAMDIMy gut sense is that non-college educated people are probably less inclined to seek such services whether because it isn't a familiar way to deal with problems, or simply because, as I'm sure Ruy Teixeira will underscore, it's simply too expensive. I'd love to hear your guests comments." First you, Brad.

WILCOXWe don't look at the issue of counseling in this particular report, and I would say in general, the record on counseling is pretty mixed. Because many counselors take the view more of a particular spouse than they do of the marriage itself. What I think is really interesting about the comments from Laura is just the way in which I think her sort of recognition of her kids' welfare, and really probably of her welfare in general as a person and as an adult in her community is dependent to some degree on her remaining married.

WILCOXTo think about probably her house, their, you know, their saving plans, and to think about their kids' educational future all wrapped up to some degree in their success in their marriage. Whereas, for many working class and poor Americans, they don't have the same stake marriage, because they don't have the same sense that there's a future for their kids educationally, that they have a house together or whatever.

WILCOXSo part of the story here is that people who are better educated I think are becoming increasingly aware of how much their future success properly defined is predicated in the success of their kids. Especially as predicated on their ability to get and stay married.

NNAMDIGot to take a short break. Laura, thank you very much for your call. You too can call us, 800-433-8850, as we discuss the evolving institution of marriage in America. Or if the lines are busy, go to our website kojoshow.org. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.

NNAMDIWe're discussing the evolution of marriage in America with Ruy Teixeira. He's a joint fellow in the Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation, and co-author of the book, "The Emerging Democratic Majority." Joining us in studio is Ross Douthat. He is a columnist with the New York Times. And Bradford Wilcox is director of the National Marriage Project, and a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia.

NNAMDIWe got an e-mail from Deborah who says, "Do your guests have any statistics about marriage and those enlisted in the military? My daughter and her husband are high school grads only with no college, but they are in the military, and are married with one child. At first blush I thought they'd be in the minority among their peers, but it seems she found many others her age and social level in the military. That is, there are a lot of married folks in their early 20's, and with at least one child." Any look at…

WILCOXYeah. There's been some really great work done in the military, and there's both good and bad things to kind of take out from that. On the good -- sort of the good stories, we don't see any racial gap at all in the military, and what we see in the military as well, is they provide very good housing benefits and, of course, medical care for members of the military. So that helps to explain the fact that there is no gap between whites and blacks when it comes to marriage in the U.S. military.

WILCOXOn the down side, there is a higher divorce rate and related, of course, in part to the fact the people are being deployed, and that's obviously a big strain on marriages. But what's interesting, and I think Ruy probably would like this particular part of the story that all the supports that folks in the military get for, you know, housing and health care really go a long way to kind of making it easier for them to get into their marriages, and not sort of having these big, you know, class or racial divides in marriage rates in the military.

NNAMDIRuy Teixeira, is that an a-ha moment for you?

TEIXEIRAYeah. Well, no. I think it certainly fits into the story I'm trying to tell, that if you make it, uh, easier and you provide more supports for people who are of middling education, they will in fact choose -- more likely to choose marriage, more likely to stay with it, and I wouldn't be surprised if even if they were in such a marriage they also found their lives easier and better. I mean, it doesn't seem to me it's rocket science here. If you make things easier and better for people, they will act in better ways.

TEIXEIRAWorking class people at this point who are not in the military, they don't have the time and the money to in a sense devote to fixing up their marriages. They have what economists would call a high discount rate. They don't really look that far into the future. They discount those future outcomes heavily, whereas people who are college educated and have the leisure and time and money to think about things, they tend to look farther ahead and have a lower discount rate, and are more will to bet, in a sense, in their future. If you're a working class person in America today, it's hard to bet on your future.

NNAMDIBrad?

WILCOXOne other thing though that's interesting is that there is a very low rate of (unintelligible) child-bearing in the military, because you can't cohabit and live in military housing. So this is where I think once again the cultural story that comes. A story that's overlooked by Ruy. And that is that, you know, this tremendous shift we've seen in our culture when it comes to things like premarital sex, cohabitation, etc., has hit the working class and poor groups in this country particularly hard.

WILCOXAnd it's, I think, of concern because we see in this report that this cultural shift helps to explain why it is that middle Americans and that poor Americans are now more likely to have kids outside of marriage to see instability in their kids' lives, and to have higher divorce rates. So it's not an economic story, nor is it a culture story. It's both culture and economics here.

NNAMDIHere is Jay in Washington, D.C. raising an issue that Ross raised earlier. Jay, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

JAYYes. I have a question as it relates to, to what extent does childhood and how your reared play into whether you're going to stay married or not. Let's say you have -- and this is a two-part question, so forgive me. The first part would be, I'd be interested to see if the study, or if other studies could be done to see how childhood plays because children emulate what their parents do.

JAYBut then the second part is, did the study take into account where you may have one spouse that is highly educated, let's say a graduate degree, and the second spouse who's also educated, but the spouses come from two different backgrounds in terms of their childhood rearing. One comes from a traditional family where the parents stayed married for 40, 50 years, the other one comes from a family where mom got married four or five times. I know that there aren't...

NNAMDISo you're saying, Jay that...

TEIXEIRA(unintelligible) in there, I'm afraid.

NNAMDIJay, you're talking about a marriage in which one partner has a higher level of higher education than another, and the issue of the impact of their childhoods. I'd like to separate them.

DOUTHATWell, I'll take...

NNAMDIRoss, you deal with the second part.

DOUTHATOh, no. The second part...

NNAMDII mean, the part with the higher education.

DOUTHATThe -- well…

NNAMDIThe part where one partner has a higher education than the other.

DOUTHATOh, well, I don't have an answer to that one. I have an answer...

NNAMDIOh, well, okay. The childhood one.

DOUTHAT…let me try it. The first one -- the second half is a narrower and very interesting statistical question. To the first half of the question, I think there's a clear correlation Brad stated, but also large between if you grow up in a disrupted family, you are more likely to have trouble forming a stable family yourself. So kids who grow up with cohabiting parents are more likely to cohabitate rather than marry. Kids whose parents are divorced are more likely to divorce themselves.

DOUTHATKids born out of wedlock are more likely to have children out of wedlock themselves. And I think what this reflects, and this goes to this sort of tangle of culture and economics. One of the difficulties I think with marriage in America today, is that the immediate economic incentives for parents to get married are I think weaker than they used to be, for reasons that reflect economic shifts and so on.

DOUTHATSo if you're a woman thinking about having kids or you've had a kid and you're debating whether to marry the father of your children, chances are that that father is maybe bringing less to the table overall than he was 30 years ago. So that immediate economic incentive is weaker. But the incentives for children are I believe as strong as ever.

DOUTHATSo the long-term benefits to children from marriage are still enormous, but the problem is there isn't that -- from the point of the view of the parents, there's less of a short term boon, and there may even be more short-term struggles.

NNAMDIBrad?

WILCOXIn terms of the educational piece, what we're seeing really is that what's the key driver here is the women's education. Women who are college educated are more likely to remain married for instance in the face of marital difficulty regardless of whether their husbands are college educated or not. And I think part of that is that we also know that women are more likely to initiate divorces in this country, much more likely to initiate divorces.

WILCOXAnd I think what's happened to some degree is that college educated women, for a number of different reasons, have gotten the message that Ross is talking about here, that the welfare of their kids depends in no small part on their success in building and maintaining a stable family. And so they themselves, if they're college educated, are now more likely to get and stay married.

WILCOXOne of the things that we find, for instance, in the report is that only two percent of white college-educated women both in the 1980's and in the present, are having kids outside of marriage. So even though there's a whole range of views about things like gay marriage and abortion and all sorts of other issues in general, we notice that white college-educated women are still very conventional, if you will, or very marriage-minded in their actual behavior.

NNAMDIRuy Teixeira?

TEIXEIRAWell, there's a ray of hope. Because every year we have more and more white college-educated women. That's one of the, you know, having a hard time keeping up the supply of college graduates in this country coming out of the universities. I mean, over all, it's level and the population is still going to be a little dip because of cohort replacement, but if you look at the people coming out into the 25 to 29 year old age group, it's pretty flat. But women are going up and men are going down.

TEIXEIRASo we got to see more women college graduates. But that said, if that works in the manner that Brad is describing, let's have more of them, which gets me back to my point about let's increase the supply of college graduates. Let's make it easier to go to school and get a four-year college degree. Because we need that for the economy, and it seems like from our discussion we need that to stabilize marriage and get the marriage rates back up if in fact that is our goal.

TEIXEIRASo I think we should seriously look at -- we shouldn't just take the educational distribution as a given. We should try to move it and not only for women actually, but also for men. Because of the problems we're talking about in a sense is a lack of marriageable males, right? That that's a big problem. If you want males to be more marriageable, give them more college education.

NNAMDIJay, thank you very much for your call. And I am unaware about whether the study looked at the conflict in a household where one partner has a masters and the other a PhD, and I don't think it looked at that. So I'm afraid we won't be about to cover...

TEIXEIRAThat's a tiny one.

NNAMDIWe won't be able to cover that specific conflict. Here now is Cindy in Alexandria, Va. Cindy, you're on the air. Go ahead, please.

CINDYHi. I'd like to make one generalization which I could think about along the economic lines. And that is that marriage is a very middle-class value. And as you've been saying, a good economic stable family makes it much easier to stay married. Right now we are in a period where wealth has been redistributed up. We have a shrinking middle class. We have a middle class which is basically sinking to lower socio-economic levels and, therefore, marriage is going to be much more stressful.

CINDYLooking at the military which is actually more of a socialist institution, we see more stability, and more marriage, and more equality in marriage. So I think it's right now with the way income is distributed in this country, it's pretty clear that we need to sort of put the brakes on that. Another -- a separate thing though, and that is a more complex issue is changing gender roles and power, and as that changes, as more women are in higher positions, couples are going to have to sort of renegotiate traditional marriage styles. So the...

NNAMDIWell, I've got two conflict...

CINDY...African-American women -- go ahead.

NNAMDII got two conflicting things for you, Cindy, and for our panelists. One is a tweet we got from Delaura who says, "My partner and I have been together 12 years with two kids. We're not married because doing so would bump both of our incomes into the next tax bracket." And another, well, this may not be in conflict, is from Alice in Bethany Beach who says, "It's important to note that our tax code actually discourages marriage in upper-income couples.

NNAMDITwo income couples pay higher taxes than singles or married couples with only one income." But the study itself seems to conflict with both of those points of view, Brad.

WILCOXWell, there is actually -- I mean, it depends on where you sit in terms of, you know, how you're earning your income, but what we do see in the literature in general is that if working class and poor couples who receive some kind of public benefit, be it food stamps or some kind of, you know, housing aid or whatnot, there is a -- sorry. There is a penalty that they pay when it comes to getting married as opposed to just cohabiting.

WILCOXAnd so one of the things is what do we do with this predicament that we're now in, is to try to eliminate the marriage penalty that exists, particularly means-tested policies like food stamps, housing aid, and some kinds of, you know, educational college aid. And if we can do that, I think we can make marriage more economically attractive to poor and working class Americans.

NNAMDIRoss Douthat, and then you Ruy Teixeira, not everyone is comfortable with the idea of government-sponsored marriage promotion if you will. Do you think there's something that we as country can or should do to make marriage more appealing and accessible to more people? First you, Ross.

DOUTHATI think that there are real limits to the kind of direct interventions that government can make. And the Bush administration actually experimented to some extent with marriage promotion initiatives through the welfare system and elsewhere. And I think that there were sort of valuable things that came out of it. But I think it's important to recognize the limits of that kind of thing that ultimately, you know, this -- it's a social problem that has to have a kind of social solution.

DOUTHATI think that the things that government can do are to sort of create broad structures in which marriage can flourish rather than trying to sort of intervene on the micro level. And I think, you know, this -- I think this sort of cuts across liberal and conservative lines to some extent. I think that Ruy is absolutely right, that you need to have overall economic policies that benefit middle America in order to have a sort of plausible stable long-term structure to create a virtuous cycle rather than the other way around.

DOUTHATBut I think those policies need to be formed with families in mind. So, you know, for instance when you think about the tax code, right, thinking about what Brad has talked about, thinking about making the tax code more family friendly in general I think might be a more promising way than sort of some kind of ...

NNAMDIAnd I'm afraid we're running out of time very quickly.

DOUTHATYes. Sorry about that.

NNAMDIThat's all right. Ruy Teixeira, you have about 30 seconds.

TEIXEIRAOkay. Well, I'd certainly say that if we believe that marriage is on average or at least holding all things equal, better for people, at least when it comes to raising kids, we should make it not more expensive to get married. So, in that sense, yes, eliminate a marriage penalty, good idea. I'm completely on point with Ross in terms of it's really about the broad social structures that should make it easier for people to get and maintain a stable marriage, and at the same time, make it better to live life not in a marriage as well. So I think that should be our target. Make it easier for people to get ahead and a lot of good things will happen.

NNAMDIRuy Teixeira is joint fellow with the Center for American Progress and The Century Foundation, and co-author of the book "The Emerging Democratic Majority." Ruy, thank you for joining us.

TEIXEIRAThank you.

NNAMDIRoss Douthat is a columnist with the New York Times. Ross, thank you for stopping by.

DOUTHATThank you for having me.

NNAMDIAnd Bradford Wilcox is director the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. He's also a professor of sociology there. Brad Wilcox, thank you for joining us.

WILCOXThanks, Kojo.

NNAMDIAnd thank you all for listening. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.