Does Education Hampers Women’s Marriage?

The recent decade witnesses rapid growth of the number of femaleuniversity students and graduate students， which was not the uniquephenomenon in China but also in United States and other OECD countries.This trend was explained as a result of higher return of education, as well ashigher possibility to a better marriage result.However, as most of these researches mainly concentrate on the assortivemating by education in marriage market, which suggests that women withhigher education would be more likely to marry with a higher educated man,few of them discussed that women with highest education level may havelower possibility to getting married.Based on Gary.S. Becker’s theory of marriage market, this paper provesthe existence of marriage gradient in China via micro econometric method,and indicates that the effect of assortive mating and marriage gradient ispossible one of the reasons for the phenomenon of so-called “Leftover”women with high education level.