ANN ARBOR—An empty nest is not nearly as powerful as a divorce in leading midlife women to start or finish a college education. That’s one of the findings of a University of Michigan study of factors influencing the chances that men and women between the ages of 35 and 53 will start college or finish earning a college degree.

The study is being presented later this month at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America in New York City.

“The transitions which have the strongest effects on a woman’s return to school are connected to changes in her marital status, not her childbearing history,” says U-M sociologist Deborah Carr, first author of the study and an assistant research scientist at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “Divorce and widowhood serve as turning points, raising a woman’s propensity to return to college and setting her on a new life-course trajectory.”

Older, “non-traditional” students comprise a rapidly growing share of college enrollment, Carr points out. National statistics show that between 1970 and 1990, enrollment of full-time students age 25 and older grew by 164 percent, compared with just 18 percent among younger students.

“The increase is even more marked for women and for students age 40 and older,” Carr notes. “The number of female college students age 25 and older increased by 477 percent between 1970 and 1990, and the number of students age 40 and older increased by 235 percent.”

In addition to divorce, Carr and co-author Jennifer Sheridan, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin, examined the effect of several other common, midlife family and work transitions, including the death of a spouse, remarriage, having one’s youngest child start school at age 6, having an “empty nest” when one’s youngest child leaves home at age 18, taking care of an ailing or aging family member or friend, and involuntary loss of one’s career or longest-held job.

For the analysis, Carr and Sheridan reviewed data on approximately 8,000 men and women from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, a random sample of 1957 Wisconsin high school graduates. The respondents were interviewed during their senior year in high school, in 1975 when they were 35 to 36 years old, and in 1992-93 when they were 53 to 54 years old. In addition to analyzing the effect of common midlife family and work transitions, the researchers also examined the effects of a number of other factors, including the educational level of one’s spouse, and aspirations for a career vs. staying home and taking care of the house.

Among the key findings:

“The general assumption that men’s lives are more rigid, while women’s are more flexible is supported by this study’s findings,” notes Carr. “The one factor in the analysis that had a large impact on men’s college attendance at midlife—military service—exemplifies the rigid sequencing of the male life course. Men who were in the military, and who presumably enlisted immediately following high school graduation, returned to college at the ‘appropriate’ time in the life course—after they had completed their military obligations.”

The story for women is far more complex, she says, with a much broader range of factors and links to others’ lives exerting an influence on a woman’s educational choices and trajectory. And that complexity is likely to increase.

“Given a reduction in the number of years spent bearing and rearing children, and an increase in the number of ‘healthy’ years experienced by women in late adulthood, women—and men—may have many more years to spend in work and educational roles,” says Carr. “As a result, age might become less important in determining one’s experiences, and education, work, and leisure pursuits might be spread across the entire life course, rather than being limited to the first, second, and third parts of it, as they have been traditionally.”

Collection of the data for this study was funded by the National Institute on Aging, the National Science Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation,

Wisconsin Longitudinal StudyNational Institute on Aging