Married with Children? The Role of Student Loan Debt

“Longer than I Would’ve Originally Liked and Originally Thought”: Postsecondary Debt and Marriage Plans for Young Adults Coming of Age in the Great Recession

“…The ubiquity of student debt has risen alongside major changes to American family life, including diverging marital expectations and behaviors across social class groups (Cherlin 2005(Cherlin , 2020Manning, Smock, and Fettro 2019). Some research suggests that student loans may impact the likelihood and timing of marriage (Addo, Houle, and Sassler 2019;Bozick and Estacion 2014;Gicheva 2016;Nau, Dwyer, and Hodson 2015;Robb and Schreiber 2019;Velez, Cominole, and Bentz 2019). However, there has been relatively little work examining how young adults subjectively understand their debt burdens and imagine the impact on their future marital plans (for exceptions, see Kuperberg and Mazelis 2021;Stivers and Berman 2020).…”