College women are increasingly marrying men without degrees as college demographics shift

A recent study published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research indicates that the widening gender gap in college graduation is reshaping American marriage patterns. As women increasingly outpace men in higher education, college-educated women are maintaining stable marriage rates by more frequently marrying higher-earning men without degrees. This shift leaves women without college degrees with a shrinking pool of economically stable potential partners, which corresponds to a sharp decline in their marriage rates.

People tend to marry partners with similar educational backgrounds, a pattern sociologists and economists call assortative mating. Over the past fifty years, United States college campuses have shifted from enrolling a majority of men to enrolling a majority of women. Today, about 1.6 million more women than men attend four-year colleges in the United States.

This demographic shift raised questions about how college-educated women would adapt to a relative shortage of similarly educated men. The study was partly inspired by conflicting narratives about modern dating. “Two puzzles,” explained study co-author Benjamin Goldman, an assistant professor of economics and public policy at Cornell University. “One is the salience of commentary (e.g., here) about how it’s become difficult to date as a highly educated woman, alongside the fact that marriage rates have been stable for women with four-year degrees.”

“The second is how those marriage rates have stayed stable, given that there used to be many more college-educated men than women, and now the reverse is true,” Goldman continued. At the same time, men without college degrees have experienced decades of economic stagnation. Their average earnings and labor force participation have dropped. The authors of the working paper designed their research to understand how these twin developments interacting together might affect the marriage prospects of women across different educational backgrounds.

To examine long-term changes, the researchers analyzed data from the Current Population Survey and the American Community Survey. They focused on American men and women born between 1930 and 1980. The sample was divided into four groups based on whether individuals had completed at least four years of college.

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The authors first tracked overall marriage rates at age 45 for these different cohorts. They observed that the ratio of college-educated men to college-educated women dropped from 1.8 in the 1930 birth cohort to just 0.8 in the 1980 birth cohort. Despite this growing scarcity of college-educated men, the marriage rate for college-educated women only declined slightly, moving from 77.7 percent to 71.0 percent.

In contrast, the marriage rate for women without college degrees fell dramatically. For the 1930 birth cohort, 78.7 percent of these women were married at age 45. By the 1980 cohort, only 52.4 percent were married.

To understand the mechanics behind this divergence, the researchers applied a mathematical model to estimate the changing value or surplus of different marital pairings. They found that the share of college-educated women married to men without degrees quadrupled. In the 1930 cohort, just 2.3 percent of all women were college-educated and married to a man without a degree. By the 1980 cohort, this figure reached 9.6 percent.

The data indicates that college-educated women increasingly partnered with a specific subset of men without degrees. The men who married college-educated women experienced an increase in average real earnings from $61,400 to $68,400 over the studied cohorts. Meanwhile, average earnings for all other men without degrees fell from $56,400 to $46,100.

This combination of economic decline and increased competition from college-educated women substantially reduced the pool of available high-earning partners for women without degrees. “The genders are not in zero-sum competition,” Goldman told PsyPost. “Troubling trends for men, like falling behind in school and the labor market, affect the marriage and family opportunities available to women, especially less-educated women.”

The researchers noted that these shifting partnership dynamics ripple across the socioeconomic spectrum. “As fewer men go to college, college-educated women have started marrying high-earning men without degrees, leaving fewer stable partners for non-college women,” Goldman added. The share of men without a college degree who earned above the national median and were not already married to a college-educated woman plummeted. That figure fell from 72.9 percent in the 1930 cohort to 35.3 percent in the 1980 cohort.

The researchers then looked at recent geographic data to see if local economic conditions mirrored these historical trends. They analyzed American Community Survey data from 2017 to 2021, focusing on adults aged 40 to 49 across 2,351 geographic areas with an average population of 140,000. They measured the employment-to-population ratio for men without college degrees in each area. The analysis controlled for local college attendance rates among women.

The geographic data supported the historical findings. In areas where men without degrees struggled to find work, marriage rates for women without degrees were substantially lower. A 7.6 percentage point drop in the employment rate for men without degrees corresponded to a 4.2 percentage point drop in the marriage rate for women without degrees. For college-educated women, the same drop in men’s employment was associated with only a 2.4 percentage point decline in marriage.

To account for the possibility that married couples simply move to areas with better job markets, the authors conducted a third analysis. They used data from the Opportunity Atlas, which links adult outcomes to the specific geographic areas where individuals grew up using anonymous tax and census records. This phase of the research categorized individuals by their parents’ income rather than their adult education level. The researchers compared individuals from families in the top 25 percent of income to those from the bottom 25 percent.

This analysis yielded similar patterns. A four percentage point decrease in employment for men from lower-income backgrounds corresponded to a 5.3 percentage point drop in marriage rates for women from similar backgrounds. For women from higher-income backgrounds, the same decline in men’s employment was associated with a 2.1 percentage point drop in marriage. In communities where lower-income men experienced higher rates of joblessness, incarceration, or mortality, the marriage gap between higher-income and lower-income women was substantially wider.

Readers might be tempted to assume that men’s declining employment directly causes women to avoid marriage. The study observes strong statistical relationships between these variables, but it cannot rule out other factors that influence family formation. “The evidence isn’t causal; it doesn’t prove that improving working-class men’s well-being would restore marriage rates to 1950s levels,” Goldman said.

Cultural norms surrounding marriage have shifted dramatically over the past fifty years, which likely plays an independent role in declining marriage rates. “But both over time and across areas of the United States, education gaps in marriage rates clearly emerge for women in environments where men struggle with non-employment, incarceration, and early-life mortality,” Goldman noted.

The research primarily focuses on opposite-sex pairings. This approach captures the vast majority of historical marriages but does not account for shifting dynamics in same-sex relationships. Additionally, the working paper was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, an organization that circulates papers for discussion and comment. These working papers do not undergo the formal peer review process typical of academic journals.

Future research could explore how specific policy interventions might alter these trajectories. “I’m hoping to answer the causal version of this question: do interventions that raise men’s economic standing improve their marriage prospects?” Goldman said.

Another avenue for exploration is how the institution of marriage itself might influence men’s economic stability and labor market success. Understanding these dynamics could provide a more complete picture of how class disparities and family formation intersect.

The study, “Bachelors Without Bachelor’s: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates,” was authored by Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, and Joseph Winkelmann.