Source: Fortune
Summary
A new study by economists Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, and Joseph Winkelmann found that the shift in marriage patterns in the US is driven by the increasing number of college-educated women and the decreasing number of college-educated men. The study, “Bachelors Without Bachelor’s: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates,” tracked marriage patterns across US birth cohorts from 1930 to 1980 and found that college-educated women have kept their marriage rates stable even as their pool of similarly educated men shrank dramatically. Non-college women’s likelihood of being married fell from 78.7% to 52.4% across the cohorts studied, while college-educated women’s marriage rates held steady above 70%.
Our Reading
The numbers tell one story. College-educated women are marrying down, pairing with men who skipped college altogether. The share of marriages in which the wife has a four-year degree and the husband doesn’t has quadrupled. Non-college men who didn’t marry a college-educated woman saw their average earnings fall by roughly $10,000. The researchers predict that Americans born in the mid-1990s are on track to become the first cohort where more than half of non-college women won’t be married at age 45. This shift reflects the labor market of the era, where well-paying jobs once let men build a solid living without a four-year degree. The dynamic echoes a well-known 2014 paper, which found that rising sorting by education and income since 1960 has been a significant driver of the growth in US household income inequality. The study’s findings describe a shift in who marries whom by credential, not necessarily proof that Americans have become choosier about matching status overall.
What affects one group naturally affects the other.
Author: Evan Null
