The New York Times\u2019 [February 2012]… story that more than half of births to American women under age 30 now occur outside of marriage, and the conversation spurred by Charles Murray\u2019s new book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960 \u201d\u201c 2010, have shifted public gaze to a population largely ignored in the scholarly literature of the past few decades: the 58 percent of Americans with a high school diploma but no college degree\u201d\u201dwhat some might call \u201cworking class.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
Nonmarital births have been common among Americans without a high school diploma for at least thirty years: as the 2010 State of Our Unions reports, in 1982 33 percent of births to women without a high school diploma occurred outside of marriage, compared to 13 percent of births to high-school educated women. But in the past thirty years, nonmarital births to high-school educated women surged: in the late 2000s\u2019, 44 percent of births to high-school educated women occurred outside of marriage. (By comparison, only 6 percent of births to college-educated women were outside of marriage.) It is the behavioral changes of this \u201cmoderately educated middle\u201d\u009d\u201d\u201dthe 58 percent of high-school educated Americans\u201d\u201dthat put the \u201cnormal\u201d\u009d into \u201cthe new normal\u201d\u009d that the Times describes.<\/p>\n
Furthermore, the \u201cnew normal\u201d\u009d is not driven primarily by an increase in single mothers, but in the number of cohabiting couples….<\/p>\n