Effects on Child Support

• Child support payments are calculated by courts after a careful examination of all factors involving the financial situation of the spouses. In most divorce situations, one spouse has a higher salary than the other. If one spouse stayed home with children and cared for the household, that spouse may not have achieved as much education as the spouse who worked outside the home. When courts are calculating child support costs, they look into the earning potential of the custodial parent. If that parent was not employed during the marriage and did not have an opportunity to obtain high academic qualifications, the court will adjust the support payments accordingly as the custodial parent will have a harder time finding a job and contributing to the child's needs.
  
  

Effects on Alimony

• Alimony, or spousal support payments, can be affected in much the same way as child support payments. If one spouse was unable to maintain gainful employment during the marriage based upon the family's decision for that spouse to remain in the household, the wage-earning spouse may be ordered to provide significant alimony payments. If one spouse does not have advanced higher education or academic qualifications, he or she may be eligible for spousal support.
  
  

Effect of Student Loan Debt

• In achieving higher education and academic qualifications, many people are forced to take on significant student loan debt. Some states require divorcing spouses to accept responsibility for the loan debt of one another whether or not the spouse actually achieved the degree. Marital debts are those which are accrued within the bonds of marriage and, like marital assets, may be dividable at divorce. Many state courts are still grappling with the issue of whether advanced degrees should be considered marital property for purposes of dividing marital debt.
  
  

Divorce Rates

• Studies have suggested that spouses with higher educations, and generally higher incomes, tend to hold more traditional viewpoints on childrearing and divorce than lower-income counterparts. College-educated couples are half as likely to get divorced than uneducated couples or those with a high school diploma. Seventeen percent of college-­educated couples who married in the early 1990s divorced in their first ten years of marriage. In comparison, 36% of less-educated couples who married in the early 1990s divorced within their first decade of marriage.