Mortar boards and wedding rings

Alex Eben Meyer

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There are more than 1.5 million more women than men attending four-year colleges today, an imbalance that has grown over the decades. Yet rates of marriage among college-educated women have remained essentially the same over the past half century.

Whom, then, are these women marrying?

“It turns out that college-educated women have maintained these stable rates by increasingly marrying men without college degrees,” says Clara Chambers, a predoctoral research fellow at Yale’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy. 

With researchers from Cornell and Harvard, Chambers looked at marriage trends over a 50-year period, beginning with women born in 1930 and ending with women born in 1980. Over this period, the rate of women with a college degree who married men without a degree more than quadrupled, jumping from 2.3 percent to 9.6 percent.

And they married a particular segment of this population: high earners. Over these 50 years, income has, on average, declined for men without a college degree. But when looking only at those men who married women with a college degree, average earnings increased.

All of this, Chambers notes, has important implications for women without a college degree, who have experienced a precipitous decline in marriage rates over this same period. In neighborhoods where men are struggling—with high rates of unemployment or incarceration, for instance—it’s not uncommon to find marriage rates below 50 percent for women without a college degree, though rates of childbirth are similar to those with better outcomes for men.

In this final statistic, the scope of Chambers’s findings expands. “I’m speculating here, as we didn’t specifically study this, but based on other research, if women are more likely to be raising children as single mothers, then that can lead to less upward mobility,” she says. “Lower household resources can have really negative effects on children, and particularly young boys.”