This paper reports trends in educational assortative marriage in Canada
and compares them to similar trends in the United States. We show that educational
homogamy — the tendency of like to marry like — has risen in both countries
over the last three decades. At the beginning of the 1970s, educational homogamy
rates were substantially higher in the United States than in Canada. However, the
tendency to marry across educational boundaries declined more rapidly in Canada
than in the United States so that by century’s end the two countries were virtually
indistinguishable. Trends in both countries were mainly driven by changing
patterns of mate selection rather than changes in the marital opportunity structure
produced by growing similarity in the educational attainments of young men and
women. We discuss these trends in the context of their implications for recent
developments and future trends in family income inequality.