MRS Degree

"I went to Smith, and I was a history major, but I never had any plans to be a historian. I was always going to be a wife. I mean, the way I saw it, a woman's job was to run a home, organize the social life of a family, and bolster her husband while he earned a living."

— Emily Gilmore, Gilmore Girls, "I Am Kayak, Hear Me Roar"

Some women go to college because they want the education. A woman who is looking for an MRS degree, though, is in college because she is looking for a husband (going from a Miss to a Mrs., y'see), and college is an excellent place to find educated single men who are likely to make a good salary in the future. These days it mostly shows up in historical fiction. If a modern woman wants to go to college just to get a man, she'll either change her mind by the end of the story for her own edification/self-improvement, or she'll be presented as shallow, selfish, or simply as squandering her opportunities.

If the story wants to portray the woman positively, she may be accused of having an MRS degree (possibly by a Straw Feminist), but she may give a few retorts, such as:

1. There's no shame in being a homemaker/stay-at-home parent.
2. Her husband is a political or religious leader, or some other public-facing career where being their spouse is practically a job of its own.
3. She's still a college-educated woman. Even if her actual degree is in a "useless" major like English, art, or history, it can still land her an entry-level office job and she could build a career from there if she so desired.

Point is, her lifestyle is by choice, not because she needs a man to take care of her, and she won't hesitate to leave him if he mistreats her.

Can overlap with Gold Digger or (more sympathetically) fears of becoming an Old Maid. A Fantasy-Forbidding Father may assume this trope is the only reason his daughter is interested in (or should pursue) higher education, and will often frustrate her college dreams by pushing her to focus more on boys and less on books (if he doesn't refuse to help her pay for college to begin with).

Contrast Higher Education Is for Women, although both this trope and the opposite trope can overlap if the woman wants both an education and a husband, particularly if she didn't have a High School Sweetheart. (And it is worth noting that a lot of people do meet their future spouses in college, or will at least have their first serious romantic relationship.) An Anti-Education Mama will likely only concede sending their daughter to college if they're aiming for one of these.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Technically this is why Nao went to Garderobe in My-Otome, she intended on using her Otome education to find a rich husband and live an easy life. A series of circumstances force her to become one of the Five Columns (essentially headmasters and autonomous forces of Garderobe) instead. She's unhappy about that.
• In Gundam: Reconguista in G, Saintflower Academy, a girls' school that works closely with the Capital Guard, apparently exists mainly as a way for young women to find a handsome young Mobile Suit pilot to marry. They are fairly blatant about it too, launching "raids" into the middle of training exercises in full cheerleader uniforms to "raise the boys' spirits". Considering what usually happens to Gundam pilots' love interests in Yoshiyuki Tomino's entries in the franchise, it's amazing the place manages to stay in business.
• It's implied that this is what Mr. and Mrs. Heim intend in ∀ Gundam, which is why Kihel decides to take a job as Lord Guin's personal secretary because she feels it will let her be more useful to society. Sochie also intends to join the Militia even before the Moonrace invades because she's not interested in being a mine owner's wife. Sochie ends up engaged to ace pilot Gavane, but he dies before they can marry, and she ends up retiring from the military to take care of an ill Mrs. Heim. It's implied she's not entirely happy about that situation. As for Kihel, she makes one final Twin Switch with Dianna and spends the rest of her life as Queen of the Moon, finally fulfilling her desire to he useful to society.
• Chie Sagamiono of You're Under Arrest! is a very peculiar case of this. For starters, she's the daughter of a rich family, so money is not an issue for her. However, she strongly believes she would be more attractive for a potential husband by being a police officer, which is why she intended to graduate from the academy on top of her class. Sadly that goal was dashed by Yoriko Nikaido accidentally one-upping her in every class, by sheer luck.
• Urara Kawashima in Food Wars!, according to Volume 2's Extras, has the dream to "Become a Wife". So while her cooking skills are seemingly enough to get her through the Training Camp (on the risk of being expelled from the academy should she fail) it's clear that her only reason to attend Totsuki Academy isn't to become a chef but to marry one.
• As shown in Golden Kamuy, Kaneko Kaeko is considered the laughing stock of her peers in the Peeress' School (then known as the Kazoku Girls' School) because she hasn't given up her studies yet. The expectation for women attending is that she does genuinely learn ladylike techniques as well as various topics, but the ultimate goal is to be wed off and drop out following the announcement. That she hasn't been announced a marriage, and thus, continues on studying, is therefore a testament to her being an unwanted bridal candidate.
• The Boys' Love Omegaverse story Takatora and the Omegas deconstructs this. Omegas constantly being in heat means that barely anyone respects them intellectually, and the general opinion of most Alphas and Betas is that an Omega should never seek higher education since they can just focus their efforts on mating with a well-to-do Alpha and still live a comfortable life. Classes for Omegas in the school that forms the manga's setting are much less intensive than the ones Alphas get, as they have to take into account the heat cycle and general pre-established prejudices. However, this makes the Omegas who do want to move forward in their careers angry and resentful of the system and of other Omegas.

Film — Live Action

• In Mona Lisa Smile, Katherine complains that she thought she was educating the leaders of tomorrow, not their wives, as her students are highly capable but have no personal ambition.
• In Titanic (1997), Rose's mother says that "the purpose of university is to find a suitable husband. Rose has already done that" to discourage her daughter going to one. Cleolinda Jones mentions this trope by name in her Movies in 15 Minutes book parody of the movie.

  Ruth: I don't see why Rose should go to university. She already has her MRS degree.

• Legally Blonde has Elle going to Harvard Law School so she can get back her boyfriend, who left her because she wasn't serious enough. After some Character Development, she rejects him when he tries to get back together with her, saying she can't date a bonehead if she wants to make partner in a corporate law firm by the time she's thirty.
• In The Help, Stuart Whitworth asks Skeeter, "Isn't that what all you girls from Ole Miss major in—professional husband hunting?"
• Jane Fonda's first film, 1960's Tall Story, has her playing a character in pursuit of this.
• Where the Boys Are: In this 1960 film about college girls on spring break, Tuggle is categorical about how she's going to college (and spring break) in order to find a husband.
  Tuggle: Girls like me weren't built to be educated. We were made to have children. That's my ambition: to be a walking, talking baby factory. Legal, of course. And with union labor.

Literature

• In Jinx High by Mercedes Lackey, Fay Harper thinks at one point that half her female classmates are going to college for husbands rather than educations.
• In The Sorceress's Orc, Vervain, Mistress of the Magical Sciences, suspects her student Amethyst of being husband-hunting. She is angry at Amethyst for not working hard enough, as she can tell that Amethyst is intelligent enough to achieve something. It later turns out that it's Amethyst's parents who would like her to find a husband. Amethyst herself is rather interested in the Magical Sciences, just a bit bored with all the learning she has to do before she can do anything interesting.
• In the Maeve Binchy novel Circle of Friends, this is Nan's whole reason for going to college, which she states outright to her mother. She's not portrayed as bad for doing this per se, as it seems more that she's just not interested in what college has to offer and wants a rich husband so she can escape her crappy home life, but she does eventually make damaging choices in her pursuit of a man. Other female characters in the book are at college to actually learn how to do stuff.
• The novel of The Help makes it clear that the only reason Skeeter and her friends were sent to college was to find good husbands and apparently, this even extends to many jobs available for women. Skeeter's desire to actually pursue a career is seen as odd and her mother outright states that she considers Skeeter's degree just a "pretty piece of paper".
• Harry Potter: Extra material on Pottermore reveals that Dolores Umbridge worked at the Ministry of Magic in hopes of latching to one of her superiors, in order to bolster her status and security, with no particular desire on which superior it would be, as long as he would be a powerful husband. She ultimately failed because, while her superiors valued her hard work and ambition, once they got to know her they saw her true colors.
• The titular Kitty Norville was in college partly to follow her White Anglo-Saxon Protestant parent's expectations to find a husband until she was bitten and became a werewolf, which killed her chance to finish her degree or lead the safe, comfortable, suburban lifestyle that her parents can.
• In The Stranger Times, Hannah never completed her degree because she found a wealthy husband to marry instead. It's unclear whether she went to university with the goal of finding a husband, but the fact that she never bothered to graduate suggests that education wasn't her highest priority.
• The first book of the The Imperials Saga by Melinda Snodgrass sees Princess Mercedes sent to attend the Imperial Space Cadet Academy, the eponymous High Ground, along with several ladies-in-waiting, because she's just been designated the heir to the Empire and therefore is required to both earn an officer's commission and find herself a prince consort—which gets complicated when she falls in love with scholarship student Tracy, the son of a common tailor.

Live-Action TV

• The episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch titled "Inna-Gadda-Sabrina" has the main character traveling to the 1960s, where she expresses interest in a certain university (one she'd even been strongly considering in the 1990s), but the man tells her that he understands if she wants to get her MRS, but they can't let girls in.
• Goodness Gracious Me had a sketch about the "Asian University", which offers a non-clinical medical degree for girls who just want to marry a doctor and don't intend to practice medicine.
• The fact that the catchprase of Patricia Fernandez in Yo soy Betty, la fea is "Yo estudié seis semestres de Finanzas en la San Marino" ("I studied six semesters of Finance in San Marino College") suggest heavily that she had this trope in mind when she got to college. Since she begins the soap having to get a job for the very first time on her life because her husband dumped her and her family don't want to take her back, it obviously didn't take.
• One episode of A Different World has Whitley confessing to Dean Hughes that when she initially came to Hillman, this trope was her plan, complete with a wedding the day after graduation and using her art history degree to pick out the right paintings to decorate the living room. As it happens, she did, in fact, meet her future husband (Dwayne) at Hillman, and they did get married within a year of her graduating.
• In an episode of Friends, Rachel's mother says: "I went from my father's house, to the sorority house to my husband's house." Rachel herself mentioned attending college (a former sorority sister shows up) but in the first episode, when hunting for a job, mentions she's "trained for nothing", so it's likely her college experience was mirroring her mother's or she failed completely. In a flashback, she's heard that she changed her major again because there was never good parking space in front of psychology department.
• Gilmore Girls:
  • The Gilmores are a very wealthy upper-class family from New England. Richard has worked in an insurance business and owns all kinds of important property. Emily met Richard while he was a student at Yale, and she studied history at Smith.
    "I went to Smith, and I was a history major, but I never had any plans to be an historian. I was always going to be a wife. I mean, the way I saw it, a woman's job was to run a home, organize the social life of a family, and bolster her husband while he earned a living. It was a good system, and it was working very well all these years."
  • This trope is deconstructed in the revival; after Richard’s death, Emily is unmoored and unable to find direction in life without the ballast of married, upper-society life to guide her. Her character arc involves finding her own passions, which involve leaving the DAR, moving to Nantucket, and putting that Smith degree to good use by becoming a docent for a whaling museum.
  • Emily also had similar plans for Lorelai, who is reticent to invite her parents to any of her life milestones because she feels they are embarrassed by her—she was supposed to “go to Vassar and marry a Yale man” but instead had a Teen Pregnancy and ended up as a maid at an inn.
  • Emily tries to manufacture this for her granddaughter Rory in season 4, throwing a party of “Yale men” specifically so they can get to know Rory and potentially become a suitor. This in spite of the fact Rory also goes to Yale and has designs on a career.
• Referenced on Mama's Family when Mama appears on Jeopardy!. During the contestant interview portion of the game, this bit occurs:
  Contestant: Just a few of the many degrees I hold include a BA, an MFA, and a PhD.
  Mama: Yeah, but do you have an MRS?
• Starsky & Hutch: One of the murder victims in the pilot is a nineteen-year-old girl who was taking pre-law in the hopes of snagging a lawyer.
• The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel:
  • Midge has one of these in Russian Literature. She got married right out of college and had two kids. Once she separates from her husband, she gets a job as a make-up counter girl at a department store despite being very intelligent.
  • In a different incident, Midge's mother Rose, who never went to college (who going off the actor’s age was born in roughly 1907) gets her husband/Midge's father Abe — a mathematics professor at Columbia—in trouble for this. Abe persuades the Columbia Art department to let Rose sit in some art classes as a favor to him. She then convinces the girls in the art department to move to the business school because that's where the good husbands are. Since girls getting Mrs Degrees fund the art department, funding dries up.
• Law & Order: One episode unfolded to reveal that a boy was killed because his mother was the head of a sorority for these sorts of women. While she did go on to have a career, she also made it very clear that finding an appropriate husband was a priority for sorority functions, and as the leader, it was her job to "squash bugs" by weeding out unworthy men from attending. One of those "bugs" felt she had ruined his chance of marrying up, and later tracked her down to murder her son so that she would know his pain.

Newspaper Comics

• An early Bloom County strip has sorority members who are in college to meet eligible men.
• An early Doonesbury took a shot at this one too, way back when the original characters were in college.
  Mike: Say, Lil, I've been meaning to ask you — what exactly do you expect out of our relationship?
  Lil: Oh gee, I don't know. I guess I was kind of hoping our romance would blossom into marriage.
  Lil: At Magnolia College we say, "Ring by spring or your money back!"^note Magnolia College was fictitious. There really was a "Magnolia Bible College" for a while, but it was founded (and disappeared again) long after this strip was written.
  Mike: Really? Here we say, "You're taking the next bus back to Magnolia."

Video Games

• In The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel, Margarete is attending a military academy to grab a husband.
• Dorothea, a songstress from Fire Emblem: Three Houses, enters the Officers Academy hoping to find a noble she can marry and live a stable life for when she is older and her appeal fades. Most of her endings do have her Happily Married or in a happy relationship (marriage is not technically mentioned in some of the endings), though whether she ends up with a noble (or even a ruler) or not depends on who she's paired off with.

Webcomics

• Joyce in Dumbing of Age is an extremely sheltered fundamentalist whose stated goal is to find a good husband and drop out. Becky mentioned that this was what her father expected her to do as well, which conflicted with any aspirations she had of her own, not to mention her being a lesbian. (For the record, both of them were getting degrees in education, in order to better homeschool their future children.) The events of the first semester end up causing Joyce to lose her faith and reevaluate her priorities.

Western Animation

• In one episode of The Simpsons, Lisa is offered a free ride to any one of the Seven Sisters Colleges, personified as college girls in a dream. "You could go to Radcliffe and meet Harvard men! Or go to Wellesley and marry them."
• In BoJack Horseman, BoJack's mother Beatrice is shown in a flashback to have been smart enough to get an actual college degree...much to the disappointment of her father Joseph Sugarman, who was hoping she'd find a husband at college but instead came home with a real degree "and a mouth full of sass". He then writes off her education as "a waste".

Real Life

• Margaret Morrison Carnegie College (MMCC) in Pittsburgh used to be located near the Carnegie Technical School (now Carnegie Mellon University), so girls attending there could snag an engineer husband. MMCC closed in 1973 once more women started attending college to find careers rather than husbands, and its campus and academics have since become part of CMU. In the late 90's, an elderly professor recounted the time period when courses were cross-listed but the schools had not yet merged, and a young woman asked to have her English grade changed from an 'A' to a 'B' to avoid showing up her husband-to-be (this was back in the day when grades are posted publicly).
• A number of universities are finding it hard to shake the reputation that their female students are attending primarily to get an MRS degree. Such schools include Texas Tech University; Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida and Arizona, and Rose-Hulman Institute in Indiana. Others can't shake the reputation that both their male and female students attend in the hopes of finding their future spouse. Some even embrace this. Brigham Young University is well known for promoting a "marriage culture" (it's a Mormon-run institution) and, jarringly, actually offers a degree in Family Life where some of the required courses are: Design in the Home, Family Meal Management, and Healthy Sexuality in Marriage. Mainstream Evangelical Christian colleges are also notorious for this, because as with the Mormons they tend to expect women to conform to traditional gender roles.
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute plays both of the above versions. As a mostly-male engineering school, there has historically been some perception that female students were pursuing an MRS degree. In addition, Russell Sage College (an all-women's college) is just downtown, and there have historically been many liaisons between RPI and RSC students, some of which sent their sons to RPI and daughters to RSC with the intent of continuing the cycle. Around Troy, New York (home to both colleges), the MRS degree is said to stand for "Marry a Rensselaer Student".
• Susan Patton was one of the first women to graduate from Princeton. In a letter to the "Daily Princetonian", she told female students to grab a husband while they were at Princeton because it was their best chance. She later clarified she wasn't invoking this trope so much as another one; as a highly-educated woman, marrying while you're still in college would be the best way to avoid an Unequal Pairing.
• Anne Spurzem, an alumna of Smith College, wrote a letter to the school's newspaper to complain that the students attending Smith were no longer the kind who, among other things, "wore cashmere coats and pearls" and "married Amherst men." The responses from current students and more recent alumnae ranged from amusement to indignation.
• Inverted in multiple news reports about "hookup culture," generally expressing the worry that college students are totally uninterested in long-term romance, preferring casual sex.
• This fifteen-year-old student had an encounter with a male (and elderly) substitute teacher who decided that the only possible reason a girl could would want to take an engineering course was to find a husband (and told the male students to grab her while she was fertile). He refused to let her in the classroom, which (this being the 21st century) led the remaining students in the class (all boys) to walk out as well. The substitute was fired after the regular teacher came back, found out what happened from both her and the other students, and reported it to the school board.
• In the Spanish-speaking world, this is known as a "carrera MMC", where MMC stands for "mientras me caso" ("while I get married"). While not very common nowadays with higher education being valued immensely irrespective of gender, the matter still gets brought up on rare occasion.

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