Marrying Up and Marrying Down
Audio Recording by Written by Richard Reeves. As read by George Hahn. https://www.profgalloway.com/marrying-up-and-marrying-down/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
The most important decision we make is who we partner with, who we marry. However, for many, marriage isn’t an essential life choice … it’s a luxury item. I asked my friend, the social scientist Richard Reeves, to pen a post on the subject.
A dramatic reversal has taken place on college campuses. Once male-dominated, they are now populated largely by women. In the early 1970s, about 3 in 5 students were men; now it is the other way around. There are 2.5 million fewer male than female undergraduates. There’s an even bigger gender gap in master’s degrees.
Does this matter? After all, the massive educational advance of women and girls is rightly seen as a cause for celebration rather than lamentation. Given that men still out-earn women, there’s an argument to be made that women need to out-learn men just to keep up in the labor market.
I think it does matter. For one thing, it highlights how the K-12 educational system fails boys. Kudos to those governors, like Wes Moore in Maryland, Spencer Cox in Utah, and Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan who have noticed. Even when men do enroll in college, they’re much less likely to get a degree. Too much male talent is being left on the table. This is why 30 or so institutions have already joined a new initiative I’m helping lead, the Higher Education Male Achievement Collaborative.
Female Hypergamy and Education
But there is one thing we can stop worrying about: that the college gender gap is reducing marriage rates. This is a common concern, and for good reason. There is pretty strong evidence for what anthropologists call female hypergamy, which is a fancy way of saying that women typically want to marry men of at least equal, or preferably higher, status. The fear is that, with so many more college-educated women than men, marriage rates will plummet.
I’ve always been skeptical of this argument. For one thing, women overtook men in higher education back in the 1980s. So if marriage rates among women with a college degree were going to fall, they’d have done so by now, and they haven’t. There is also some evidence from European countries that hypergamy declines as gender equality increases.
Because this is an empirical question, I commissioned an empirical study. The resulting paper, by Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, and Joseph Winkelmann, uses data from Opportunity Insights, a team of researchers and policy analysts at Harvard led by economist Raj Chetty.
Marriage rates among college-educated women have been rock-steady at around 70% for decades, at least since World War II. The decline in marriage rates has been among women without a B.A. As a result, a huge class gap in marriage has opened up. As the authors of the study write for AIBM:
“The stable marriage outcomes for college-educated women sharply contrast with the significant decline in marriage rates among women without a B.A. over the past half-century. Among women born in 1930, there was no education gap in marriage rates. Since then, a nearly 20 percentage point gap has emerged, with college-educated women now significantly more likely to marry.”
The simple math here means that some women with college degrees must be marrying men without college degrees. That is exactly what the paper finds. One in five college-educated women marry a man without a four-year degree. What’s more surprising is that this was always the case, long before the great educational overtaking. College-educated women born in 1950 were as likely as those born in 1980 to marry a man without a degree.
Money Matters, Too
Women with college degrees continue to marry at high rates, in part because of the continued willingness, among one-fifth of them, to “marry down” in terms of education. This suggests that a combination of female hypergamy and a growing gender gap in education is not having a negative impact on marriage rates. Of course, there are still many unanswered questions. Maybe some of the 30% of those women with a B.A. but no wedding ring would be more inclined to marry if there were more college-educated men around. The stability of the marriage trend suggests not, however. It looks like they just don’t want to marry, period.
In the most interesting couples from a cultural perspective, the wife has more education than the husband. At first glance, that bucks the whole idea of hypergamy. But of course, education is only one marker of marriageability and status. It turns out that money matters a lot, too. Men who have a college-educated wife, even though they don’t have a B.A. themselves — in other words, men who’ve “married up” in educational terms — make a lot more money than other guys with similar levels of education.
Among those born in 1980, guys who married up make $68,000 a year, compared to the $46,000 a year earned by men who either married a woman without a degree or didn’t marry at all.
The earnings premium among men who marry up educationally has gotten bigger over time. This shows that women with a degree are willing to marry men without one — so long as they’re making decent money. Women might “marry down” in terms of education, but not in terms of earnings.
Closing the Marital Class Gap
The good news here is that economically viable men have decent marriage prospects and that women with degrees can find a good man. The bad news is that men doing badly in the labor market are likely to struggle in the marriage market, too.
The paper finds that, in areas where working-class men are doing better, marriage rates go up, cutting the marital class gap in half. Making men more “economically viable,” to use one of Scott’s favorite terms, turns out to be key to improving marital prospects.
There’s a corrosive downward spiral at work right now. As the economic prospects of men without a college degree decline, marriage rates fall. That leaves millions more men and women without a partner to share the responsibilities and benefits of family life. In other work by AIBM, we show that half of men without a college degree aged 30 to 50 now live in a household without children.
Without the positive pressures that come from being a father and husband, men are even less likely to really go for it on the work front. They are more likely to be unemployed. They become more vulnerable to addiction, more socially isolated. All of which makes them less attractive as potential spouses. Boys raised in single-mother households then struggle in school and in life, and they have difficulty finding a mate and forming a family, too. And so the cycle turns. The economic struggles of boys and men become entrenched across generations.
Where to Start
It’s not often enough stressed that the class gap in marriage is not only a consequence of economic inequality, but also a cause of it. Pooling incomes into a single household is obviously optimal, from an economic perspective, especially for those with the lowest incomes — who are now the least likely to marry. Some scholars suggest that the class gap in marriage can explain much of the decline in social mobility in recent decades.
Concerns about marriage should then be focused on men and women with less educational attainment and/or worsening economic outcomes. The problem is not that your daughter graduating from Amherst or Berkeley won’t find a man good enough for her. The problem is that a woman in Appalachia or the Bronx won’t find a man she sees as worth marrying.
The best pro-marriage, anti-poverty strategy is simple: improve the economic prospects of working-class and lower-income men.
Simple does not mean easy, of course. Massive investments in education and training are required, as well as more spending on infrastructure, place-based policies to help the poorest counties, and much more besides.
But it’s clear where to start: with the boys and men.
—Richard
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P.P.S. Have a question for Scott on Thriving in the Age of AI? He’s hosting a free AMA on March 20–RSVP now.
I’d be interesting to see the same type of research in EU, China and India.
I am a new reader of Scott Galloway.
First—
Scott reads Peter Drucker and that makes me happy. Readers can try an author name search on your local library web page. Try Wikipedia too.
Second —
I worked 11 years with special education kids as a para educator. I tried to understand how learning works.
Daniel Kahneman: Every day I tie my boots. I puzzle how my hands and fingers do the movements. Somewhere in my brain some wet ware is tying my shoes. Daniel Kahneman has made some very important discoveries about how the brain works. In the last few years, a question that puzzles me is how does a tyrant do something with words analogous to what I do when tying my shoes?
I have taught young men in vocational education for many years. Those who arrive straight from school need much more support and mentoring than those who arrive in their early 20s with some life experience behind them. Rhe late starters are focused, work hard and achieve greater career opportunity.
The problems with boys education, achievement and career begin in early scroll experiences. Education is feminized because women run early education. The la k of male teachers and role models is a serious deficit in our education system. We need more men teaching and involved in curriculum design. To achieve that we need to pay teachers more and socially value and respect the role of teachers in our society.
I loved being a classroom teacher but felt disrespected by business people who were unable to see the direct connection between educational achievement at business productivity and performance and national GDP.
If there are men without obvious opportunity let’s see if we can bring them into our education system. We need them!
Another interesting marriage classification – 50% of marriages end in divorce, and understandably; you take a punt in your 20’s when your testosterone is firing, and sometime over the next few years you realise it is not all about sex. Some people make exactly the right decision and become joined at the hip – these are “love mates”; but probably the majority of marriages are “flatmates” – they remain loyal, maybe because of kids, but maybe because each partner does their own thing but can come together when they need. As we go forward and live to 150, you can imagine that those “flatmates” at (say) 60, will see a long runway, and more will send up in divorce ie “Check mate”
Well, Scott, you did pretty well being raised by a single mom. You’ve pointed out your many advantages–UCLA was open to you and inexpensive, etc.–but you’re surely an example of what can be accomplished regardless of personal circumstances.
I know it’s hard to remember when liberal journalists hate conservative ones so much nowadays, but there was a time when The Washington Times was a parking place for spouses of journalists at The Washington Post and other outlets.
I gather they used to make sport of going after one TWT person in particular, some “loser” from a small paper, while drawing attention away from their own TWT and Moonie connection. It appeared that the targets were being worked on by the Moonies’ brainwashing operation to help them along, and the bullies, who were rather extreme, knew about that and helped it along.
I’d guess that bullying was their way of justifying their TWT jobs to liberal friends; it seems like an awful thing to do to justify your work for a conservative paper.
The Washington Post has mentioned the bullying that liberal journalists do to low-level TWT people, including an article around 2000 which quoted Dick Cavett. Whatever they thought, it would seem to have helped work over TWT journalists for the Rev. Moon and the right, so they can pat themselves on their backs for helping TWT and the Moonies.
I hope someone could corroborate that, since that’s a great Washington story that’s been going around for years, no doubt.
Whatever people admit to, they can’t deny that there have been quite a few accepted journalists at more left-leaning papers who’ve been part of TWT over the years.
I would guess that if TWT had its claws into anyone’s brain, anything you said in bullying as a swaggering liberal can be used against you. It would have been a good test of your words to see which ones would backfire and lose you the most votes.
I’m sure Dick Cavett gave a lot of help to TWT and the GOP, since he admitted it in TWP.
At any rate, if your words or actions were ever enough to get a present or former TWT employee who’s trying to shake mind control to vote Republican, you’d be a poor representative of the Democratic Party.
There was a story a few years back that former TWT editor John Solomon, now editor of The Hill, retreated to his mountain cabin right after leaving TWT. A site called Mediabistro published his activities from people who were apparently spying on him from outside. I’ve always guessed he was trying to make sure there weren’t any Moonies left in his brain, so to speak, although I don’t expect him to acknowledge that. I wish he would, though, since his words could help free others who may have had a bit of TWT follow them wherever they went.
NMNM is always an interesting read! Thought for a moment about sharing this one with my wife…but then decided otherwise. Don’t want to put any ideas in her head!
But I am concerned about the teenage boy in my household. He way too much resembles this trend. Thanks for the thoughts!
I hope you will focus on helping your son toward a career and a well-balanced life. Don’t get excited about his red or blue political choice, and especially don’t get upset because he’s still a virgin as a teen (which you would be doing if you’re upset about him possibly becoming an incel, which merely means a man who hasn’t had sex in at least six months. Even if you don’t really know what the word means, your son might be bright enough to.). I got a lot of crap from affluent kids at college — not quite rich, but a lot closer to it than my family — and it appears that the sort of crap I got from that clique hits boys today more routinely, even in high school. If your son is acting like someone’s pressuring him, consider that he might be being bullied, even by people who say they’re righteous, and he isn’t automatically in the wrong.
1. The college degree is missing from this analysis. A BA in Feminist Lit or Gender Studies is useless. General education at 95% of US colleges is worthless from a future income point of view. Electricians make more than Primary School teachers. Men see that, entrenched academics do not.
2. Colleges are run by Feminists, many elevated because of DEI. Look at who the ‘top’ Universities sent to testify in Congress over the attacks on Jewish students. Three female PhDs Presidents who were completely unprepared and looked illiterate. Harvard, MIT, Penn.
3. Against the wall of feminists and weak men, a guy doesn’t stand a chance in a he said/she said event. Duke LaCross, UofV/Rolling Stone fake ‘frat rape’ story, all were not even investigated Men were destroyed. Men see that.
To get men back into college, dump the worthless majors. Focus on what they want, careers. Treat criminal issues in criminal courts, not a lynching by angry women.
Those non-college men who marry college women are what you might call mensch types, give that they seem to make money and marry desirable women. So it seems unsurprising that among those who don’t marry the desirable women you would find lower earners. That aspect of this seems like a dog-bites-man story, doesn’t it? But the thing is, nowadays, college is what high-school was two generations ago. I think a version of this study that focussed on women who graduated from the better schools would be interesting, and I’m going to guess it would tell quite a different story.
Scott, I agree with most of your premise that educated women are more likely to get married than non-college educated women. I can personally attest to this as I’ve seen my daughter and 7 of her college educated friends get married in the last 2 years. Of course, I think this is great news for the economy of wedding planners, venues, jewelers, bakery, florists, and itinerant DJ’s playing the couple’s song list! But I don’t think the education level is the greatest determinant of women who marry… I think it may also be related to college-edcuated women who come from stable 2-parent households are more likely to marry. That was the common denominator with my daughter and her girl friends who got married in 2023-2024. I would love to see the research and analysis of why eligible, college-educated men seem to lag in finding a life partner. I personally know over 10 young men that are seemingly eligible (have a great job and career, own a home or their own apartment, attractive, healthy, and pleasant gentlemen with great conversational skills) – but are still looking for that elusive soul mate. Any thoughts or definitive research on that?
I’m a white woman with rural working class roots, now in a midwest city with friends ranging from middle class to extremely wealthy. Most couples are on the same level of looks, no rich trolls with hot chicks—nor vice versa. After a lifetime of broad social circles, I know exactly 2 women still in this region who clearly married for money. The gold diggers left for NY long ago. I’d love to see this broken down by region.
Thank you for doing research on this, it’s great to know that education for women tends to lead to higher marriage rates. This research is really incomplete though and you are jumping to solutions without studying all the cases that should be considered. Minorities have always just had to find the resilience to succeed, and research shows this can be a good thing. You might be depriving boys and men of an opportunity to learn resilience and to understand the important lesson that life is not fair. Gay men have learned this pretty early on, and as a result we make 10% more than our straight peers. What you are doing instead could be considered a support for the argument of misogynists, who feel straight men’s place is to rule and dominate everyone else and that it is a tragedy if they don’t.
It is not socially acceptable to talk about this but I totally agree. Just because you support the empowerment and equal treatment of women(who have historically been treated unfairly in the workplace) doesn’t mean we can’t address this issue. Men start wars. Men get into fights. Unhinged, detached men shoot up churches, schools & events. Woman don’t. We need to figure out how to get young men feeling more connected. One that I wish people would realize is a man’s worth should not be tied up in his ability to generate wealth. It is as unfair as putting as woman’s worth in her looks. I know it is hard wired but woman are changing and so should the standards for men. Anyways, I love that Scott has the courage to talk about this stuff. Young men are struggling(adult men too since they do so much of the child raising now but don’t have the social circles and support women do) and this needs to be fixed otherwise we are going to have more violence and more issues in our society. Women need to stop valuing men solely on their earning potential and men need to stop valuing women on their looks. Sorry for the rant.
“ This is why 30 or so institutions have already joined a new initiative I’m helping lead, the Higher Education Male Achievement Collaborative.” Sounds like DEI to me!
Red shirt all boys one year in preschool.
This only works if you segregate classes by gender. Otherwise all through school, from kindergarten through high school, boys, who are already bigger and stronger than girls of the same age, will have even more of a size advantage. Girls are already bullied and sexually harassed by boys—having to be in class with older boys will only make it worse.
I’m not sure if it is a trend but I do know several educated parents who are delaying entry to kindergarten by one year for their sons. However, the cost of an extra year of preschool exerts economic pressure on parents to send their sons to kindergarten and hope for the best.
It takes affluence to send a kid to preschool for an extra year, and it might be an idea that only affluent people can think up. If there’s a big nasty that targets boys from even affluent backgrounds, how do working parents who aren’t affluent give their boys a chance?
While there may be validity to this research, is this also a reflection of another premise – a shift to a more entrepreneurial, Gig economy, and the hyper speed of change in the market where traditional education is no longer a dictator of professional success. Maybe for various reasons, the risk tolerance for men is different to pursue a career without traditional education. Your data seems to imply that the path to partnership between men and women as long as they are both successful isn’t impacted, so perhaps the educational background argument is not the issue. Perhaps the greater observation is that the identified value of partnership between educated women and entrepreneurial men is in fact the opportunity that drives each other’s success!
Unmentioned is the decline of unions. Whatever the job, belonging to a union is important for both decent pay and job security. The researchers don’t seem to have noted the presence or absence of a Union.
Until the past month, having a government job was, in many ways, similar to having a union.
All workers deserve decent pay and benefits. Trying to fix the problem by focusing on the individual men leaves the institutional problems unresolved.
We need to institute compulsory military service for men and THEN THEY GO TO COLLEGE. Men need the direction service provides.
That’s sexist. I’ve seen lots of women who could use that sort of direction as much as the men, and a few countries like Israel provide it by drafting both men and women. Why should men be forced into a rigid boot camp and a rigid mind-set, only to get out and fall behind women who have been given the benefit of free thought?
Thanks for a wonderful article. I think what we’re seeing is a lot of women realizing they don’t need to put up with men’s bullshit and now men need to realize that being an asshole means you may not get the chance to say “I Do.” I think if men want to really create connection, they’re going to have to do better. And I think it has nothing to do with economics. They need to learn to be better humans. How they behave impacts their ability to forge relationships, find jobs and develop adult skills. There’s a reason why a mother is single—her partner was terrible to her. The solution here is holistic—and not just about jobs. Look at Elon Musk and his track record. Do you honestly think some self-respecting woman looks at him and think he’s a catch even though he’s the richest man in the world? Nope! So if you want balanced men who are good providers, teach them to be compassionate and stop acting like a baby.
This is an awesome conclusion to draw. I think you’re on to something!
77 year old male. I agree with this post.
Are you a psyhologist? The “ability to forge relationships, find jobs and develop adult skills” are the three tasks of humans as postulated by Adler: 1) find meaningful work / purpose, 2) develop friendships, and 3) forge intimate relationships. Not just for men, but all human beings.
Might need to check the reduction/correlation in male success to the rise of influencers like Joe Rogan.
Rogan follows his audience more than he leads it.
If any Democrats are hoping there could be a leftist version of Rogan, who convinces men that they should vote blue even when the blue candidates are insulting and condescending, they shouldn’t waste their money. That’s how Kamala Harris ran up a big debt.
I don’t like Trump and I’ve never listened to Rogan, but I couldn’t be convinced that a blue candidate who obviously doesn’t like me likes me by a Bizarro Rogan, either. I don’t think anyone’s that stupid.
Until Elon Musk became Political Enemy No. 1, ahead of Trump, he had no trouble practicing serial monogamy, and could have switched lovers anytime he wanted. I’ve heard women talk enough about the problems with the men they do choose to know that they’re selective, but not always about the right things. You’d know that if you were the less affluent guy they took it out on when the rich, handsome guys let them down.
Does this mean that all the women who hate incels are simply expressing their feeling that they will only marry for money, and that they hate any guy who isn’t rich?
When you supply the data, Scott, it sure sounds that way.
Is it a fact that the large increase in women college graduates contains low cash value, or unemployable degrees majoring in Gender studies and Curatorial studies. If so, would that devalue the average women’s degree and diminish the ‘gap’ when ‘marrying down’.