Over the last half-century, four-year colleges have shifted from enrolling predominantly men to women. While the growing scarcity of college-educated men might seem to threaten the marriage prospects of educated straight women, the data tell a different story, according to a 2025 study published in the journal Social Science Research Network.
The paper combines economic modeling and data analysis insights about how people view education, stability and partnership, showing that marriage decisions reflect both financial realities and changing social expectations.
“People pitch … marriage trends and dating trends in the U.S. as a crisis among highly educated women … but in the data, that’s the group where marriage rates have remained most steady,” said Prof. Benjamin Goldman, public policy and economics, who co-authored the 2025 paper. “Whereas it's specifically for working class women without college degrees that you've seen collapse.”
Over the same period, men’s economic opportunities have narrowed. Industries that once secured stable income without degrees have declined, while new jobs increasingly reward those with formal education. At the same time, boys and men have fallen behind women across education, from high school performance to college enrollment.
As non-college-educated men’s job prospects weakened, so did their perceived stability as long-term partners. The result isn’t just fewer marriageable men, but a widening divide between those who can offer economic security and those who can’t.
Faced with a shrinking pool of college-educated men, college-educated women had two options: compete harder for educated men or expand who they considered suitable partners.
“We knew college women had maintained stable marriage rates, but didn’t know whether they’d done that by increasing assortative mating or by substituting and marrying men without college degrees,” said Clara Chambers, a pre-doctoral research assistant at Yale University’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy. “It turns out it’s the latter.” Assortative mating describes people’s tendency to partner with others similar to themselves.
This shift helped keep marriage rates stable even as campus gender balances shifted. Rather than delaying or opting out of marriage, many college women started prioritizing economic stability over educational credentials alone.
“Marriage used to be something at the start … at the beginning of when you’re setting up your adult life,” Goldman said. “One thing that’s changed culturally is [it’s] often viewed as a capstone. It’s something you do when you have everything else taken care of.”
At the same time, what people look for in a partner has also shifted.
“Education might be one thing [people care about], but it’s also a proxy for economic stability,” Chambers said. “If a man didn’t go to college but owns a local business, he can still provide a relatively good life and be a good partner.”
According to Goldman, these trends can be harder to see on elite campuses, where dating pools tend to be highly educated and economically advantaged. National marriage patterns are shaped more by broad economic and demographic forces rather than by relationship patterns at selective universities, Goldman said.
In general, marriage across education levels has not hurt college women economically. College-educated women who marry non-college men remain highly engaged in the labor force, often earning as much as or more than their spouses, according to the research paper. Increasingly, these partnerships reflect two earners rather than a single breadwinner model.
But that adjustment that helped college women maintain stable marriage rates has had spillover effects for non-college women.
“If we’re worried about marriage rates, we really shouldn’t be worried about college-educated women,” Chambers said. “We should be worried about folks who didn’t go to college.”
Historically, economically stable non-college men often married women without college degrees. As college women increasingly partnered with these men, the pool of financially stable partners for non-college women shrank. For women born around 1930, roughly 75% of non-college men were economically viable and unmarried, Goldman said. Today, that number is closer to 35%.
Higher-earning non-college men are increasingly partnering with college-educated women, while earnings for other non-college men have stagnated. The result is a sharp decline in marriages between non-college men and non-college women, driven less by changing preferences than by structural economic constraints.
Geography also matters. In areas where most non-college men are employed, marriage rates for non-college women are higher, Chambers explained. Where men struggle economically, marriage rates struggle too.
As marriage declines among non-college women, single-parent households have increased, Chambers told The Sun. In many cases, however, fertility rates have remained steady even as marriage rates fell — a side effect of non-educated women’s marriage patterns, Goldman said.
Marriage trends reflect more than economic trends alone, and it remains unclear whether strong economic conditions would be enough to reverse them.
“The trends themselves aren’t uncertain, but what's driving them and what they mean for people’s lives is still very much up for debate,” Goldman said.
Among Generation Z, dating itself looks different. Many young adults are dating less or not at all, prioritizing long-term relationships over casual ones Goldman said, and approaching dating apps and algorithm-driven matching with skepticism. According to Goldman, research suggests that Gen Z may be more selective and slower to enter relationships — trends that may intersect with but don’t fully explain broader economic marriage patterns.
“It would be interesting to see what sort of economic intervention, if any, would improve marriage rates, or if it’s something more cultural,” Chambers said.
The shortage of college-educated men hasn’t created a marriage crisis, but it has quietly reshaped who partners with whom — meaning in the modern marriage market, stability may matter more than credentials.
