Six Decades of Educational Assortative Mating in South Korea: A Research Note

This research note focuses on accurately documenting the trends in educational resemblance between husbands and wives in South Korea over six decades, from 1960 to 2020. Having undergone rapid social changes in recent history, including industrialization, economic development, and educational expansion, Korea offers a compelling context for studying long-term changes in educational assortative mating across different stages of development. Using 2% microsamples from 13 census datasets collected between 1960 and 2020, we construct marriage tables cross-classifying six educational levels of husbands and wives, both aged 25 to 45. Log-multiplicative layer effect models are applied to assess the husband‒wife association, controlling for changing marginal distributions of both spouses' educational levels. Our analysis of 843,527 married couples shows that the association between husbands' and wives' education increases to a peak around 1995, after which it continuously declines. The inverted U-shape trend remains robust whether analyzing current or first marriages of varying duration and across different types of log-linear models. We provide theoretical and empirical discussions of major macro-level trends, especially the timing and gendered patterns of educational expansion, in Korea to contextualize the observed patterns of educational assortative mating.