New @axios: Drop in marriage concentrated among women w/o college degrees in part because men in their world have worse economic prospects.
— Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) January 31, 2025
Yet another sign that male marriageability is falling among poor & w-class men.👇🏼 pic.twitter.com/DmO5nymDBU
Chambers, Clara and Goldman, Benjamin and Winkelmann, Joseph, Bachelors Without Bachelor's: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates (January 01, 2025). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=5086363 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5086363. Abstract:
Over the past half-century, the share of men enrolled in college has steadily declined relative to women. Today, 1.6 million more women than men attend four-year colleges in the U.S. This trend has not lowered marriage rates for college women, a substantial share of whom have historically married economically stable men without college degrees. Both historical evidence and cross-area comparisons suggest that worsening male outcomes primarily undermine the marriage prospects of non-college women. The gap in marriage rates between college-and non-college women is more than 50% smaller in areas where men have the lowest rates of joblessness and incarceration.
