Thinking of dating and marriage as a market sounds odd, but it’s a useful framework: supply and demand shape romantic outcomes. A quick story illustrates how a change in the pool of potential partners can matter.
Musician-producer Jack Antonoff once described how transferring from a New Jersey public school to a New York performing-arts high school transformed his social and romantic life. Surrounded by artsy peers, he went from being teased to being a scarce straight male among many gay or queer classmates — and, he joked, wound up dating Scarlett Johansson. The punchline points to a broader social dynamic: when the composition of a dating pool shifts, some people’s prospects improve while others’ worsen.
Demographers and economists have long documented how gender imbalances reshape marriage markets. After World War I, for example, France lost many young men; surviving men were in shorter supply and on average paired with women from higher social classes. Conversely, China’s long-running preference for sons, amplified by the One Child Policy, produced a persistent surplus of men, and research suggests women there have leveraged relative scarcity in the marriage market.
The United States doesn’t have extreme sex-ratio distortions like those cases. Instead, the important imbalance is educational and economic: women are now more likely than men to graduate from college, and many men without degrees have faced stagnating wages, higher rates of substance use, imprisonment, and unemployment. Female undergraduates now make up roughly three out of five students, and women outnumber men on campuses by millions.
A new working paper by Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, and Joseph Winkelmann, “Bachelors Without Bachelor’s: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates,” examines how these shifts affect marriage patterns for Americans born roughly between 1930 and 1980. Their findings sketch a major transformation in the U.S. marriage market.
First, marriage declines in recent cohorts are highly concentrated among women without four-year degrees. For women born in 1930, about three-quarters were married by age 45 regardless of education. For women born in 1980, college-educated women saw only a modest drop in marriage by age 45 (from about 77.7% to 71.0%), while non-college-educated women experienced a steep fall (from about 78.7% to 52.4%). In short: marriage has become much less common for women who did not go to college.
A second puzzle: if college-educated women outnumber similarly educated men, why haven’t their marriage rates collapsed? Chambers and colleagues test two possibilities. One is that college-educated women increasingly marry other college graduates; the other is that they substitute toward marrying men without four-year degrees. The data support the second explanation: many college-educated women are marrying men who lack a bachelor’s degree. Crucially, they aren’t marrying any random non-college men; they tend to pair with the higher-earning tier of non-college men — small-business owners, skilled tradespeople, technicians, and others who do relatively well without a degree.
That pattern leaves behind a pool of non-college men who are economically precarious. Those struggling men make up much of the marriage market available to non-college-educated women. The study’s authors argue this shrinking supply of economically stable men helps explain why marriage rates among working-class women have plunged while college-educated women have largely maintained their marital rates by partnering downward educationally but not necessarily economically.
Some women today choose to delay marriage or remain single for personal reasons, and a growing number of financially secure women pursue parenthood without a partner. But Chambers and her coauthors emphasize that for many working-class women the decline in marriage looks less like a preference shift and more like a reflection of diminished economic prospects among available men. Non-college women are still having children at relatively high rates, but increasingly as single mothers. Children raised in single-parent households face higher average risks of poverty and other adverse outcomes, which in turn can exacerbate inequality across generations.
The authors frame this as a phenomenon of “missing economically stable men.” It’s not that men are literally absent; rather, there are fewer men who are both available and economically positioned to be marriage partners for many women without college degrees.
If this diagnosis is correct, policy responses that strengthen education, reduce incarceration, and expand access to stable, well-paying work for men without college degrees could have downstream effects on family formation. Investments that help more men succeed in school, avoid criminal justice entanglement, and find steady employment might not only improve individual lives but also change the dynamics of the marriage market for working-class Americans.
In short: changing numbers and fortunes — not just preferences — are reshaping who marries whom. Educational gains for women are a major social advance, but when men’s economic prospects lag, marriage and family patterns shift in ways that carry broad social and economic consequences.