Colleges, Assortative Mating, and Intergenerational Mobility in Twentieth-Century America

We use newly digitized records for 1.2 million students at 60 co-educational U.S. colleges, 1915–1943, linked to enrollment records for their children through 1963, to study how colleges shape marital matching and the intergenerational transmission of educational advantage. About 6% of men and 9% of women marry someone from their own college. This homogamy is largely causal: within colleges, more different-sex classmates and longer campus overlap both raise same-college marriage. Same-college spouses are more educated, and this advantage persists across generations. Children of same-college couples more often attend selective colleges, with spousal education explaining a third of the gap.