declining marriage – A new study links declining U.S. marriage rates for non-college-educated women to a shrinking pool of economically stable men. It suggests college-educated women have maintained higher marriage rates largely by partnering with higher-earning men without four-y
Jack Antonoff once got bullied in public school in New Jersey for being an artsy punk with blue-dyed hair. the kind of look that made people assume he was gay. Then he transferred to a performing arts high school in New York City around the turn of the millennium. and everything turned around for him. He told the Howard Stern Show that his dating life improved because of what he described as a demographic imbalance. “I went from being made fun of for being ‘gay’ — because I had blue hair — to being the only straight kid in the class. ” Antonoff said.
It sounds like a personal anecdote. But the economics of who has access to whom has a way of showing up in private life, too. In Antonoff’s telling, a different classroom changed who was available to date. In a broader new working paper. economists Clara Chambers. Benjamin Goldman. and Joseph Winkelmann trace a national version of that same logic: shifts in education and economic stability are reshaping the marriage market in ways that land unevenly across gender and class.
The study. titled “Bachelors Without Bachelor’s: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates. ” argues that the struggles of many American men have created something like a game of musical chairs for women trying to get married. College-educated women, the researchers find, have largely maintained high marriage rates. But they appear to be doing it by increasingly marrying men without a four-year degree. and on average those men are the higher earners. Women without a college education, the paper suggests, face a shrinking pool of economically stable husbands. They are still having children, but their marriage rate has plummeted, and many are raising kids by themselves.
The mechanism matters because marriage is not just romance. It also determines who has support, who builds a household budget, and who shoulders risk. The paper’s authors tie today’s patterns to a widening gap in men’s and women’s economic and educational trajectories. In the United States, the ratio of men to women is “pretty even,” the piece says. The problem is not that there are dramatically fewer men. It is that large numbers of men are falling behind in the credentials and earnings that tend to make marriage more feasible.
Women are now more likely to graduate from college than men. In recent years. female students have made up almost 60 percent of undergraduate students. and outnumbered men on college campuses by more than 2. 000. 000. according to a government estimate included in the paper’s discussion. At the same time. many men who did not get a college education have struggled economically and have been more likely. the paper says. to end up on drugs. in prison. and unemployed.
That is where the story borrows a lesson from elsewhere. Economists and social scientists have long examined what happens to dating and marriage markets when gender imbalances appear after major shocks. A large body of research looks at post-war societies where the loss of young men reshapes marriage outcomes. An influential study on France after World War I found that men who remained in France tended to “marry up. ” pairing with women from higher social classes that would have been “inaccessible before the war.” In China. the opposite kind of squeeze has been studied for decades: a long-running surplus of men relative to women. fueled by the 1979 One Child Policy and traditional preferences for boys. Even though China has since ended the One Child Policy. research has suggested that women have leveraged relative scarcity and become more likely to “marry up.”.
The United States is not being described as having that extreme imbalance. What the paper argues is a quieter version of it, where the “missing” element is not women. It is economically stable men.
Chambers. a research fellow at Yale University who co-authored the study and will begin a PhD in economics at Harvard this fall. put the classroom logic in plain terms: “Folks tend to marry people who look like them.” Economists call that “assortative mating.” The idea is that educated people with high earning potential often pair with other educated people who have similar earning prospects. powering households higher in the income distribution.
That pattern runs into a demographic reality. Chambers told the story of her own experience growing up in Worcester. Massachusetts. which she describes as a poster-child of deindustrialization. She said many of her high school friends were raised by single mothers. “And. anecdotally. I saw a lot of my female friends went to college. and a lot of my male friends didn’t.”.
In the data she and her coauthors examined. the marriage rate differences show up sharply between women who do and do not attend college. The economists looked at Americans born between 1930 and 1980, spanning the Greatest Generation through Gen X. For college-educated women, marriage rate declines, the study finds, were modest. Among those born in 1930, 77.7 percent were married at age 45, compared to 71.0 percent for the 1980 cohort. For women who did not go to college, the decline was far steeper. For those born in 1930, about 78.7 percent of non-college-educated women were married at age 45, slightly higher than among college-educated women. For those born in 1980, only about 52.4 percent were married at 45.
Chambers said the decline is concentrated among Americans who aren’t going to college. “The decline in marriage rates that we’ve seen in America is really concentrated among Americans who aren’t going to college,” she said.
One puzzle in the study is how college-educated women kept marriage rates comparatively high even as the pool of college-educated men shrank. The paper tests two theories. The first was that college-educated women dramatically increased the rate at which they were marrying college-educated men. The second was that they were marrying men without four-year degrees at higher rates. Chambers said the evidence pointed to the second explanation. “And when we looked into it. we found it’s really the second explanation: college-educated women are substituting towards marrying men without four-year degrees. ” she said.
That substitution does not mean all non-college men are treated the same in the marriage market. As the paper frames it. non-college-educated men as a group may have struggled economically in recent decades. but not all of them are struggling. Many are doing well as small business owners, mechanics, contractors, electricians, plumbers, pilots, HVAC technicians, and, sometimes, musicians. The paper name-checks Jack Antonoff as an example, pointing out that he “never graduated college.”.
In the study’s findings. the average pairing pattern matters: college-educated women are. on average. marrying the higher-earning tier of non-college-educated men. Chambers described the leftovers as a separate pool. “And what’s left is a pool of non-college-educated men who are really struggling,” she said. “And that makes up the market of available men for non-college-educated women. which we think might be why they’ve seen such steep declines in marriage rates over this period.”.
The human consequence is not limited to wedding statistics. The paper ties declining marriages among working-class Americans to what it describes as bleeding economic instability into social life. It notes that some people may not want to marry and may delay or skip it altogether. including a growing number of financially secure women pursuing parenthood on their own through IVF and other means. But for many working-class Americans. the researchers argue declining marriages reflect not only changing preferences but declining economic stability. especially among men without college degrees.
Women without a college education are still having children at relatively high rates. the paper says. but increasingly without partners who can reliably contribute income. time. or support. It adds that kids raised by single mothers, on average, face higher risk of poverty, incarceration, unemployment, and other hardships.
If the story is really about a shrinking supply of economically stable men, then the policy debate shifts. The paper suggests that efforts to build a better economy and help Americans excel in school. avoid prison. and find stable work could have knock-on effects in marriage rates. Chambers said. “I think there are ways to help these men that are struggling that we expect might have downstream effects on marriage rates.”.
For now, the marriage market described in “Bachelors Without Bachelor’s” is not collapsing in one dramatic event. It is changing under pressure, moving like a supply chain that can’t catch up. In that system, the classroom logic Antonoff described does not stay personal for long. It starts to look structural. and it leaves behind a question that reaches far beyond romance: what happens to families when stability becomes harder to find. not because people stop wanting love. but because the men who can reliably build a life with it are increasingly out of reach?.
United States politics marriage rates gender gaps education assortative mating single mothers working class economic stability Clara Chambers Benjamin Goldman Joseph Winkelmann