Prague, Aug 5 (CTK) – Roughly one-third of university students in Europe live along with their partners who studied the same branch of study, according to a study conducted by the Institute for Democracy and Economic Analysis (IDEA) of the Economics Institute (EI) of the Czech Academy of Sciences.
However, the number of such couples differs in various fields of study and countries, the study, which analysed data from 24 EU countries, said.
The trend to form couples with the same university education of both partners is bigger if there is an unequal representation of men and women in the fields of study, the analysis said.
The Czech Republic is among the countries with more homogamous couples than elsewhere.
The least number of partners with the same field of study are among the graduates of services and agricultural fields, the biggest in social and health sciences.
The biggest number of the partners who studied a similar branch of study live in Slovakia, Greece and Denmark, the smallest in the Netherlands, Latvia, Slovenia and Cyprus.
A situation similar to that in the Czech Republic is in Austria, Sweden and Portugal.
The analysis has confirmed that the proportion of men and women in various branches of study has a natural influence on their forming couples.
In engineering, where men make up 80 percent of all students, it is difficult to find a female partner from their own field.
On the other hand, female engineers can make a choice from many potential partners, living with the man of the same education in 60.5 percent of the cases, the study said.
In the services fields of study, where the representation of students is more equal when it comes to gender, homogamous couples make up roughly 22 percent, it added.
The study analysed 120,040 couples from various European countries. It denoted as homogamous the couples in which both partners attained the same university degree in one of the eight fields of study. These were education, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, engineering, agriculture, health sciences and services.
