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The most important decision we make is who we partner with, who we marry. However, for many, marriage isn't an essential life choice … it's a luxury item. I asked my friend, the social scientist Richard Reeves, to pen a post on the subject. |
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A dramatic reversal has taken place on college campuses. Once male-dominated, they are now populated largely by women. In the early 1970s, about 3 in 5 students were men; now it is the other way around. There are 2.5 million fewer male than female undergraduates. There's an even bigger gender gap in master's degrees. |
Does this matter? After all, the massive educational advance of women and girls is rightly seen as a cause for celebration rather than lamentation. Given that men still out-earn women, there's an argument to be made that women need to out-learn men just to keep up in the labor market. |
I think it does matter. For one thing, it highlights how the K-12 educational system fails boys. Kudos to those governors, like Wes Moore in Maryland and Spencer Cox in Utah, who have noticed. Even when men do enroll in college, they're much less likely to get a degree. Too much male talent is being left on the table. This is why 30 or so institutions have already joined a new initiative I'm helping lead, the Higher Education Male Achievement Collaborative. |
The Female Hypergamy Effect |
But there is one thing we can stop worrying about: that the college gender gap is reducing marriage rates. This is a common concern, and for good reason. There is pretty strong evidence for what anthropologists call female hypergamy, which is a fancy way of saying that women typically want to marry men of at least equal, or preferably higher, status. The fear is that, with so many more college-educated women than men, marriage rates will plummet. |
I've always been skeptical of this argument. For one thing, women overtook men in higher education back in the 1980s. So if marriage rates among women with a college degree were going to fall, they'd have done so by now, and they haven't. There is also some evidence from European countries that hypergamy declines as gender equality increases. |
Because this is an empirical question, I commissioned an empirical study. The resulting paper, by Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, and Joseph Winkelmann, uses data from Opportunity Insights, a team of researchers and policy analysts at Harvard led by economist Raj Chetty. |
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Marriage rates among college-educated women have been rock-steady at around 70% for decades, at least since World War II. The decline in marriage rates has been among women without a B.A. As a result, a huge class gap in marriage has opened up. As the authors of the study write for AIBM: |
"The stable marriage outcomes for college-educated women sharply contrast with the significant decline in marriage rates among women without a B.A. over the past half-century. Among women born in 1930, there was no education gap in marriage rates. Since then, a nearly 20 percentage point gap has emerged, with college-educated women now significantly more likely to marry." |
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The simple math here means that some women with college degrees must be marrying men without college degrees. That is exactly what the paper finds. One in five college-educated women marry a man without a four-year degree. What's more surprising is that this was always the case, long before the great educational overtaking. College-educated women born in 1950 were as likely as those born in 1980 to marry a man without a degree. |
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Money Matters, Too |
Women with college degrees continue to marry at high rates, in part because of the continued willingness, among one-fifth of them, to "marry down" in terms of education. This suggests that a combination of female hypergamy and a growing gender gap in education is not having a negative impact on marriage rates. Of course, there are still many unanswered questions. Maybe some of the 30% of those women with a B.A. but no wedding ring would be more inclined to marry if there were more college-educated men around. The stability of the marriage trend suggests not, however. It looks like they just don't want to marry, period. |
In the most interesting couples from a cultural perspective, the wife has more education than the husband. At first glance, that bucks the whole idea of hypergamy. But of course, education is only one marker of marriageability and status. It turns out that money matters a lot, too. Men who have a college-educated wife, even though they don't have a B.A. themselves — in other words, men who've "married up" in educational terms — make a lot more money than other guys with similar levels of education. |
Among those born in 1980, guys who married up make $68,000 a year, compared to the $46,000 a year earned by men who either married a woman without a degree or didn't marry at all. |
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The earnings premium among men who marry up educationally has gotten bigger over time. This shows that women with a degree are willing to marry men without one — so long as they're making decent money. Women might "marry down" in terms of education, but not in terms of earnings. |
Closing the Marital Class Gap |
The good news here is that economically viable men have decent marriage prospects and that women with degrees can find a good man. The bad news is that men doing badly in the labor market are likely to struggle in the marriage market, too. |
The paper finds that, in areas where working-class men are doing better, marriage rates go up, cutting the marital class gap in half. Making men more "economically viable," to use one of Scott's favorite terms, turns out to be key to improving marital prospects. |
There's a corrosive downward spiral at work right now. As the economic prospects of men without a college degree decline, marriage rates fall. That leaves millions more men and women without a partner to share the responsibilities and benefits of family life. In other work by AIBM, we show that half of men without a college degree aged 30 to 50 now live in a household without children. |
Without the positive pressures that come from being a father and husband, men are even less likely to really go for it on the work front. They are more likely to be unemployed. They become more vulnerable to addiction, more socially isolated. All of which makes them less attractive as potential spouses. Boys raised in single-mother households then struggle in school and in life, and they have difficulty finding a mate and forming a family, too. And so the cycle turns. The economic struggles of boys and men become entrenched across generations. |
Where To Start |
It's not often enough stressed that the class gap in marriage is not only a consequence of economic inequality, but also a cause of it. Pooling incomes into a single household is obviously optimal, from an economic perspective, especially for those with the lowest incomes — who are now the least likely to marry. Some scholars suggest that the class gap in marriage can explain much of the decline in social mobility in recent decades. |
Concerns about marriage should then be focused on men and women with less educational attainment and/or worsening economic outcomes. The problem is not that your daughter graduating from Amherst or Berkeley won't find a man good enough for her. The problem is that a woman in Appalachia or the Bronx won't find a man she sees as worth marrying. |
The best pro-marriage, anti-poverty strategy is simple: improve the economic prospects of working-class and lower-income men. |
Simple does not mean easy, of course. Massive investments in education and training are required, as well as more spending on infrastructure, place-based policies to help the poorest counties, and much more besides. |
But it's clear where to start: with the boys and men. |
—Richard |
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P.P.S. Have a question for Scott on Thriving in the Age of AI? He's hosting a free AMA on March 20–RSVP now. |
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