College-educated women face an increasingly daunting marriage market, according to an emerging narrative in academia and the media. Women so outnumber men on four-year campuses – by 1.6 million – that women graduates will struggle to find “marriageable” partners, the story goes, potentially pushing down their marriage and fertility rates.

But that concern is misplaced, finds new research co-authored by a Cornell economist. In fact, the researchers found, college women have married at a steady rate for decades, while the rate for women without degrees has dropped precipitously – their prospects undermined by the declining fortunes of noncollege men.

The results suggest research and policy should increasingly focus on working-class men and women, the scholars said, whose children are more likely to grow up in lower-income or single-parent households, with implications for economic opportunity in the next generation.

“Historical data and recent trends across the U.S. indicate that finding a spouse has been – and will likely continue to be – challenging for non-college women. Meanwhile, college women have continued to marry despite the declining availability of college men,” said Benjamin Goldman, a postdoctoral associate and incoming faculty member in the Cornell Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy and the Department of Economics. “The pool of men historically available to marry noncollege women has been doing much worse across a range of indicators, including earnings.”

The findings are reported in “Bachelors Without Bachelor’s: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates,” a just-released working paper co-authored by Goldman with Clara Chambers, a predoctoral fellow at Yale University’s Tobin Center for Economic Policy; and Joseph Winkelmann, a doctoral candidate in economics at Harvard University. The team posted a summary of the research with the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM).

The gender imbalance in higher education now is larger, in the reverse direction, than in 1972, the year Title IX was enacted. A growing share of noncollege men, relative to noncollege women, might at first seem to benefit women without degrees – but the economists’ analysis showed otherwise.

Reviewing historical data from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey, they examined outcomes at age 45 for women born between 1930 and 1980. Marriage rates remained remarkably stable among college-educated women, holding above 70%, but dropped sharply among those without degrees – from 78.7% to 52.4%.

The reason, the scholars said, is that college-educated women continued to marry (or not) in essentially the same manner throughout that 50-year period. Roughly half married a college-educated man; about one-quarter “married down” in education, to a noncollege man; and another quarter remained unmarried.

“What that means is that these growing gender gaps in college attendance are not nearly large enough to put downward pressure on marriage rates for college women, because only one in two of them have historically married college-educated men,” Goldman said. “College-educated women are able to substitute and marry some men from the noncollege pool.”

Importantly, the researchers determined, those men represent the highest incomes among men without college educations, a group whose average annual earnings at age 45 have – shockingly, Goldman said – declined in real terms over 50 years. While average earnings increased among noncollege men who married college women, they fell among the rest by $10,000, to about $46,000 a year, in 2024 dollars.

The researchers next investigated outcomes for recent cohorts (born 1978-83) to see if they followed the trends observed over time. Data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and the Opportunity Atlas, a collaboration between the Census Bureau and Harvard-based nonprofit Opportunity Insights, allowed them to compare metro areas across the U.S.

The same pattern held, Goldman said: As men did worse, noncollege women’s marriage prospects suffered, college women’s much less so. In areas where noncollege men had the most stable economic outcomes – including the lowest rates of joblessness and incarceration – education gaps in marriage between college and noncollege women were 50% smaller than in areas where noncollege men had the worst economic outcomes.

The data suggests education gaps in marriage will continue to widen, the researchers said: Americans born in the mid-1990s are poised to become the first cohort in which marriage rates for noncollege women fall below 50%. They said efforts to improve prosperity and well-being for working-class men – who have experienced declines in education, employment, income and lifespan – could have positive spillover effects for noncollege women, and for their children.

“Our research indicates that improving economic opportunities for men without a college degree could substantially increase marriage rates, particularly in poorer communities and among non-college-educated women,” the team concluded.

“Doing so,” Goldman said, “could not only benefit the current generation but also increase the share of children born into married, two-parent households, potentially improving outcomes for children born to low-income mothers.”

The researchers received funding support from AIBM and Cornell.