Think of dating and marriage as a market: changes in supply and demand reshape outcomes. A small anecdote helps make that clear. Musician and producer Jack Antonoff has told how transferring from a New Jersey public school to a New York performing-arts high school changed his social life. Surrounded by artsy peers, he went from being teased to being a rare straight guy among many queer classmates — and found a high-school romance with Scarlett Johansson. Stern’s joke that he “picked a school where everyone was gay” gets at a simple point: the makeup of a social pool matters for who pairs with whom.
Economists have long documented the effects of gender imbalances on marriage markets. After World War I, for example, France lost many men; studies show the remaining men tended to “marry up,” pairing with women from higher social classes. Decades of China’s one-child policy and son preference produced the opposite imbalance — a surplus of men — and research there suggests women have leveraged their relative scarcity to marry upward.
The United States doesn’t have extreme gender ratios, but something important has shifted: men and women are diverging in education and economic outcomes. Women now earn nearly 60 percent of undergraduate enrollments, outnumbering men on campuses by millions. At the same time, many men without college degrees have fallen behind: higher rates of unemployment, substance use, incarceration and other problems have reduced their economic stability and social mobility.
A new working paper by Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman and Joseph Winkelmann — “Bachelors Without Bachelor’s: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates” — examines how that widening educational gap is reshaping U.S. marriages. The paper tracks people born between 1930 and 1980 and finds a striking pattern: marriage declines over recent decades are concentrated among women who did not attend college.
Numbers matter. For women born in 1930, roughly 78 percent of both college-educated and non-college-educated women were married by age 45. By the 1980 cohort, 71 percent of college-educated women were married at 45 — a modest decline — but just about 52 percent of non-college-educated women were married at 45. The long-run drop in marriage is therefore concentrated among women without four-year degrees.
How are college-educated women keeping their marriage rates relatively high despite fewer college-educated men? Chambers and her colleagues considered two possibilities: that college women increasingly married other college graduates, or that they shifted toward men without degrees. The data point to the second: many college-educated women have been pairing with men who lack four-year degrees, but not with the weakest among them. Instead, they tend to marry the better-off segment of non-college men — skilled tradespeople, small-business owners, technicians, pilots, and others who earn solid incomes without a bachelor’s degree. That leaves a remaining pool of non-college men who are economically insecure.
The consequence is a kind of stratification within the non-college population. College-educated women substitute downward in credentials but upward in partner earnings, while non-college-educated women face a shrinking set of economically stable potential husbands. Those women continue to have children at relatively high rates, but are increasingly raising them outside stable two-parent households.
Some social scientists have called China’s deficit of women “missing women.” A useful way to think about the U.S. pattern is that we increasingly have “missing economically stable men.” This helps explain the rise in single-mother households and suggests another channel through which economic inequality is transmitted across generations. Children raised by single mothers, on average, face higher risks of poverty, school dropout, and later-life instability.
Of course, marriage decisions are driven by many factors beyond education and income: attraction, shared values, personality and so on. But decades of research show assortative mating — the tendency to pair with someone of similar socioeconomic background — amplifies inequality. When parts of the male population lose economic footing, that loss doesn’t just affect men; it reshapes opportunities for women and the well-being of children.
If the problem is, at least in part, a shortage of economically stable men in some communities, policy responses could be targeted at the root causes: expanding access to quality education and vocational training, reducing incarceration and improving re-entry, addressing substance-use disorders, and promoting pathways to steady employment. Strengthening economic opportunity for men who lack college degrees could have downstream effects on family formation and child welfare.
In short, America’s marriage market is shifting not because people suddenly don’t value stable relationships, but because the pool of potential partners has changed. Better outcomes for families may therefore require improving the economic prospects of the men who have been left behind.