A National Bureau of Economic Research study reveals that American women with four-year college degrees are increasingly marrying the highest-earning men without college degrees, causing non-college women’s marriage rates to plummet from 78.7% for the 1930 birth cohort to 52.4% for the 1980 cohort. Between these two cohorts, the share of marriages where the wife holds a degree and the husband does not quadrupled from 2.3% to 9.6%, while average earnings of non-college men married to college-educated women rose from $61,400 to $68,400. The pool of « marriageable » men available to non-college women, defined as those earning above the national median and not already married to a college graduate, collapsed from 72.9% to 35.3%. Researchers predict that Americans born in the mid-1990s could become the first cohort where more than half of non-college women will not be married by age 45.
Source: Read the original article
