College as a Marriage Market, by Lars Kirkebøen, Edwin Leuven, Magne Mogstad

Here's a recent working paper about college and marriage in Norway:

College as a Marriage Market, by Lars Kirkebøen, Edwin Leuven, Magne Mogstad

Abstract: Recent descriptive work suggests the type of college education (field or institution) is an important but neglected pathway through which individuals sort into homogeneous marriages. These descriptive studies raise the question of why college graduates are so likely to marry someone within their own institution or field of study. One possible explanation is that individuals match on traits correlated with the choice of education, such as innate ability, tastes or family environment. Another possible explanation is that the choice of college education causally impacts whether and whom one marries, either because of search frictions or preferences for spousal education. The goal of this paper is to sort out these explanations and, by doing so, examine the role of colleges as marriage markets. Using data from Norway to address key identification and measurement challenges, we find that colleges are local marriage markets, mattering greatly for whom one marries, not because of the pre-determined traits of the admitted students but as a direct result of attending a particular institution at a given time.

 Here's a summary from the Becker-Friedman Institute:

College as a Marriage Market, by Larn Kirkebøen, Edwin Leuven, Magne Mogstad

"The context of the authors’ study is Norway’s postsecondary education system. The centralized admission process and the rich nationwide data allow them to observe not only people’s choice of college education (institution and field) and workplace, but also if and who they marry (or cohabit with), and to credibly study effects of college enrollment. The authors find the following:

"The type of postsecondary education is empirically important in explaining whom but not whether one marries. 

"Enrolling in a particular institution makes it much more likely to marry someone from that institution. These effects are especially large if individuals overlapped in college, are sizable even for those who studied a different field and are not driven by geography.

"Enrolling in a particular field increases the chances of marrying someone within the field but only insofar as the individuals attended the same institution. Enrolling in a field makes it no more likely to marry someone from other institutions with the same field. 

The effects of enrollment on educational homogamy (or marriage between people from similar backgrounds) and assortativity vary systematically across fields and institutions, and tend to larger in more selective and higher paying fields and institutions. 

Only a small part of the effect of enrollment on educational homogamy can be attributed to matches within the same workplace.

Lastly, the effects on the probability of marrying someone within their institution and field vary systematically with cohort-to-cohort variation in sex ratios within institutions and fields. This finding is at odds with the assumption in canonical matching models of large and frictionless marriage markets.

Taken together, these findings suggests that colleges are effectively local marriage markets, mattering greatly for the whom one marries, not because of the pre-determined traits of the students that are admitted but as a direct result of attending a particular institution at a given time."