The study, titled “Bachelors Without Bachelor’s: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates,” was authored by Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, and Joseph Winkelmann and offers a data-driven look at how education and economics now shape who marries, and who is increasingly left out.
College-educated women in the United States are increasingly marrying men without degrees, a shift that is reshaping marriage patterns and deepening class divides. New research finds that as women surge ahead in higher education, they are more often partnering with the small share of high-earning men who lack college credentials.
This trend has helped college-educated women maintain relatively stable marriage rates despite a growing shortage of similarly educated men. But it has also left women without college degrees facing a shrinking pool of economically stable partners, contributing to a sharp decline in marriage among less-educated women.
Education gap and changing marriage
The working paper, circulated by the National Bureau of Economic Research, analyzes how shifts in education and the labor market have altered who marries whom. Researchers examined data for Americans born between 1930 and 1980 using the Current Population Survey and the American Community Survey.
Over that period, the ratio of college-educated men to college-educated women at age 45 fell from 1.8 to 0.8, reflecting women’s strong gains in higher education. Yet the marriage rate for women with four-year degrees slipped only modestly, from 77.7 percent for the 1930 birth cohort to 71.0 percent for the 1980 cohort.
For women without college degrees, the picture was starkly different. Their marriage rate at age 45 dropped from 78.7 percent among those born in 1930 to 52.4 percent among those born in 1980. The authors argue that this divergence is closely linked to both education trends and the economic struggles of men without degrees.
Who college women are marrying now
To understand how marriage patterns adjusted to the new education landscape, the economists modeled the “surplus” from different types of pairings. They focused on how often college-educated women partnered with men who lacked degrees and how those men fared economically compared with their peers.
The share of all women who were college-educated and married to a non-college man roughly quadrupled across birth cohorts. For those born in 1930, 2.3 percent of women fit this pattern; for those born in 1980, the share rose to 9.6 percent, indicating that cross-education marriages became far more common.
However, college-educated women were not marrying just any men without degrees. The subset of non-college men who married college-educated women saw their average real earnings climb from 61,400 dollars to 68,400 dollars. By contrast, the average earnings of all other men without degrees fell from 56,400 dollars to 46,100 dollars.
This divergence suggests that higher-earning men without college degrees are increasingly “matched up” with college-educated women. As a result, non-college women face more competition for a diminishing group of financially secure partners, helping to explain why their marriage rates have declined so sharply.
Labor markets and local marriage patterns
The study also connects men’s employment prospects to regional marriage outcomes. Using American Community Survey data from 2017 to 2021, the authors analyzed adults aged 40 to 49 in 2,351 geographic areas with average populations of about 140,000.
They measured the employment-to-population ratio among men without college degrees in each area and compared it with local marriage rates, while controlling for women’s college attendance. The findings reinforced the long-term patterns seen in the historical data.
In regions where men without degrees were less likely to be employed, marriage rates for non-college women were noticeably lower. A 7.6 percentage point decrease in employment for men without degrees was associated with a 4.2 percentage point drop in marriage among women without degrees.
For college-educated women, the same decline in men’s employment corresponded to a smaller, 2.4 percentage point reduction in marriage. This suggests that women with degrees remain better positioned to find partners, even when local labor markets weaken.
Early life background and family formation
To test whether these patterns reflect where people grow up rather than where they later move, the researchers turned to the Opportunity Atlas, which links adult outcomes to childhood neighborhoods using tax and census data. Here, they focused on parental income instead of education.
Individuals were grouped into two broad categories: those raised in families in the top 25 percent of the income distribution and those from the bottom 25 percent. The authors examined how men’s employment rates by origin area related to women’s later marriage rates within these income groups.
They found that a four percentage point drop in employment among men from low-income backgrounds was associated with a 5.3 percentage point decline in marriage among women from similar backgrounds. By comparison, for women raised in higher-income families, the same decline in male employment corresponded to only a 2.1 percentage point drop in marriage.
The pattern was especially strong in communities where working-class men faced high levels of joblessness, incarceration, or early mortality. In those areas, the gap in marriage rates between women from high- and low-income families widened markedly, underscoring how economic distress among men can exacerbate class-based divides in family formation.
Limits of the evidence and future research
Although the study shows robust statistical links between men’s economic standing and women’s marriage outcomes, the authors caution against reading the results as simple cause and effect. Cultural shifts around marriage, cohabitation, and childbearing over the last half-century likely play an independent role.
Lead author Benjamin Goldman notes that the evidence does not prove that restoring men’s wages or employment would return marriage rates to mid-20th-century levels. The analysis instead illustrates that declines in working-class men’s fortunes are closely intertwined with the growing marriage gap by education and income.
The work also focuses primarily on opposite-sex marriages, which still account for most unions in the period studied but do not capture evolving patterns in same-sex relationships. Future studies could examine whether similar educational and economic sorting is emerging in those partnerships.
Because the paper is an NBER working paper, it has not yet undergone formal peer review. The authors plan further research to test whether policies that improve men’s earnings, job stability, or health measurably change their likelihood of marrying and supporting families over time.
They also highlight the need to explore how marriage itself might influence men’s labor market success, for instance by encouraging more stable employment or supporting better financial decision-making. Understanding these feedback loops could help policymakers address the intertwined challenges of economic inequality and shifting family structures.
