With fewer men going to college, U.S. marriage market makes surprising shift

In recent decades, people in the U.S. have tended to marry partners with similar educational backgrounds. As fewer men graduate from four-year institutions, one might think that heterosexual college-educated women are running out of matches.

Not so, according to economists with Harvard’s Opportunity Insights (OI) research lab. Their findings, detailed in a new working paper, show stable marriage rates for college-educated American women. Why? Because they’re increasingly marrying men without higher education who land in high income brackets.

That means the dating imbalance has shifted to women without bachelor’s degrees, historically most likely to marry men with similar levels of education. This population of women is now experiencing a decline in marriage rates.

“Men without degrees are doing relatively worse economically, but they’re also more likely to be married to college-educated women,” said OI Research Principal Benny Goldman, one of the paper’s three co-authors. “From the perspective of non-college women, if your goal is to marry a spouse who’s relatively economically stable — which, if you look at survey data on women’s preferences for marriage, it's clear that is something folks want — that person has become much harder to find.”

Goldman and his co-authors became interested in analyzing marriage data after reading think pieces published online, mostly written by and for highly educated women, about the challenges of finding a mate in the current marriage market. Goldman said he found these perspectives puzzling, since previously established research shows highly educated women in the U.S. have maintained stable marriage rates over the last half-century.

He also knew college-educated men are becoming increasingly scarce. The ratio of men to women completing four years of college has declined from 1.8 for those born in 1930 to 0.8 for cohorts born in 1980.

“If people prefer to marry people from a similar education background — which is true based on the historical data — you would think that the marriage prospects of college-educated women should be stressed by these trends in education rates,” said Goldman, also an assistant professor of economics and public policy at Cornell University. “Well, what gives? How have college-educated women managed to maintain stable marriage rates, even though college-educated men are in shorter and shorter supply?”

Completing the research with Goldman were OI data scientist Joe Winkelmann and Clara Chambers, an incoming Economics Ph.D. student at the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Using data from the Current Population Survey, the American Community Survey, and census and tax records from the Opportunity Atlas database, the economists compared education levels and marriage rates of people born between 1930 and 1980.

They found a quadrupled share of marriages where the wife has a four-year college degree and the husband does not, up from 2.3 percent among women born in 1930 to 9.6 percent among those born in 1980.

“They've begun marrying men who did not go to college but still seem to be doing quite well economically — maybe folks who own a small business or are an expert technician,” Goldman explained.

Women without college degrees are feeling the impact of this shift. For them, the pool of eligible bachelors with similar education and earnings above the national median has sharply dwindled. In the 1930 cohort, 73 to 75 percent of men without college degrees fit this description. Today, only 35 percent do.

As a result, marriage rates are down for women without bachelor’s degrees. While 78.7 percent born in 1930 were married by age 45, only 52 percent of those born in 1980 were married by the same age.

“These changes are happening at the same time as non-college women are economically doing better themselves,” Winkelmann said. “That could also matter, when you think about who they’re thinking of as a viable partner.”

The researchers, who also analyzed the data across commuting zones, noted that marriage rates are down in regions where joblessness, incarceration, and poor health outcomes are high for men without college degrees. They suggest that improving outcomes for men — which may improve marriage rates for women who didn’t go to college — is an area where more research is needed.

“Another way of putting it,” Winkelmann said, “is that there might be spillover effects from the outcomes of non-college men onto the marriage outcomes of women, especially non-college women.”

Following marriage and family formation trends is important, Goldman said, since marriage is statistically correlated with health, longevity, and life satisfaction. Survey data show most people consider it an important part of leading a meaningful life.

Additionally, studying marriage rates gives economists more information on the advantages being conferred upon the next generation.

“Whether you’re married and who you’re married to determines the set of resources that kids in the next generation have to grow up with,” Goldman said. “The decline of marriage rates among working-class Americans means kids raised in those households are now less likely to have two parents, both from a time and an income perspective. It’s important to pay attention to these trends.”