College women marriage rates hold as non-college women fall behind
An NBER working paper finds college-educated women are marrying high-earning men without degrees as non-college women’s rates drop.
By Sofia Marchetti · World Affairs Correspondent
3 min read
College women marriage rates have stayed high despite a widening gender gap in higher education, according to a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. The study says college-educated women are increasingly marrying men without four-year degrees, especially those with stronger earnings, while women without college degrees face a thinner pool of economically stable partners.
The paper, by Clara Chambers of Yale, Benjamin Goldman of Cornell and Joseph Winkelmann of Harvard, examined U.S. birth cohorts from 1930 through 1980. It found that the ratio of college-educated men to college-educated women fell from 1.8 to 0.8 over that period, while four-year colleges now enroll 1.6 million more women than men.
Goldman told Fortune that men’s four-year college attendance stopped rising decades ago, while women’s continued to increase. That shift, he said, has changed the set of potential spouses available to college-educated women.
Why are college women marriage rates holding up?
The researchers found that college-educated women did not respond to the shortage of similarly educated men by leaving marriage at the same pace as other groups. Instead, more of them married across the education line.
The share of marriages in which a wife has a four-year degree and her husband does not rose from 2.3% of all women in the 1930 birth cohort to 9.6% in the 1980 cohort, according to the working paper. The non-college men who married college-educated women were higher earners: their average income rose from $61,400 to $68,400.
Other non-college men saw a different pattern. The study found their average earnings fell by about $10,000, to roughly $46,000, if they did not marry a college-educated woman.
Goldman told Fortune the paper does not explain why individual couples form. He also said the education gap does not necessarily show a status imbalance, citing examples such as a nursing-school graduate marrying a small-business owner, electrician or HVAC technician.
What does “marriageable men” mean in the study?
The study defines “marriageable” non-college men as those earning above the national median who are not already married to a college graduate. By that measure, the share available to non-college women fell from 72.9% of non-college men in the 1930 cohort to 35.3% in the 1980 cohort.
That decline coincided with a sharp drop in marriage for women without college degrees. Their likelihood of being married fell from 78.7% to 52.4% across the cohorts studied, while college-educated women’s marriage rates stayed above 70%.
The researchers also projected that Americans born in the mid-1990s may become the first cohort in which most non-college women are not married by age 45. They based that forecast on earlier cohorts’ marriage and cohabitation patterns in their early 30s and known outcomes at age 45.
Goldman told Fortune the link between men’s economic position and women’s marriage prospects appears across time and place. He said areas with weaker outcomes for working-class men are the same places where marriage rates for working-class women are lower.
The paper does not claim that falling male earnings caused the marriage changes. Goldman said the findings show the two trends happening at the same time, and he argued that policies affecting men and women cannot be separated cleanly because marriage involves pairs.
This story draws on original reporting from Fortune.