Are declining marriage rates concentrated among women without college degrees?
Core argument: Marriage rates for college-educated women have remained stable over the past fifty years even as the relative supply of college-educated men steadily declined, counter to the prediction that growing gender education gaps would reduce their marriage prospects.
We show that historical trends over the past half-century and cross-area comparisons from recent cohorts do not support the prediction that growing gender gaps in education will reduce marriage rates for college-educated women. Instead, the data suggest that worsening male outcomes primarily diminish the marriage prospects of non-college women. We show that marriage rates for college-educated women have remained stable over the past fifty years, even as the relative supply of college-educated men has steadily declined. The overall decline in marriage rates is driven almost entirely by a sharp drop in marriages between non-college women and non-college men, who have experienced significant declines in economic and social outcomes over this period. Second, we show that data from recent cohorts across different regions of the U.S. align closely with these historical patterns. In particular, the education gap in marriage rates for women is substantially larger in areas where non-college men face the highest rates of joblessness and incarceration. [Further analysis] shows a consistent and clear correlation across all racial and ethnic groups between the outcomes of men from low-income families and the marriage rates of women from low-income families.