Grad school and marriage

Given that someone who never updates his blog seemed to think that grad school and marriage are a bad combination, it seems worth mentioning that there's some evidence to suggest that such is not the case:

A year ago, a graduate student in economics at Cornell University released a study showing that men who are married are more likely to finish doctoral programs than are single men. When Inside Higher Ed wrote about the study, the graduate student, Joseph Price, received numerous questions from readers wanting to know just how far the marriage advantage took men in academe, and where it applied to women as well.

Price went back to his data and now is out with a new study. This one shows that married men do better than single men in academe not only in finishing their Ph.D.'s, but in publishing and landing a first tenure-track job. Married women have some advantages over their single counterparts, but not as many as married men do. And students with domestic partners are somewhere in the middle. The study was based on data from 11,000 graduate students from 100 departments over a 20-year period. While separate breakdowns were not available for those couples with and without children, a majority of the men and women in the study who were married had children while in graduate school.

... That marital advantage continues beyond Ph.D. completion. The study found that married male students are 4 percentage points more likely to publish articles while in graduate school and to publish more articles, and are 8.4 percentage points more likely to obtain a tenure-track job within six months of graduating, compared to single male graduate students.

Source: Inside Higher Ed, (Image from icanhazcheezburger)