No Mercy / No Malice: Marrying Up and Marrying Down

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Speaker 1 I'm Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice. What's the new luxury item?

Speaker 1 Marriage.

Speaker 1 Maring up and marrying down, as read by George Hahn.

Speaker 2 This post was written by Richard Reeves.

Speaker 2 A dramatic reversal has taken place on college campuses. Once male-dominated, they are now populated largely by women.
In the early 1970s, about three in five students were men.

Speaker 2 Now it is the other way around.

Speaker 2 There are 2.5 million fewer male than female undergraduates. There's an even bigger gender gap in master's degrees.
Does this matter?

Speaker 2 After all, the massive educational advance of women and girls is rightly seen as a cause for celebration rather than lamentation.

Speaker 2 Given that men still outearn women, there's an argument to be made that women need to outlearn men just to keep up in the labor market.

Speaker 2 I think it does matter. For one thing, it highlights how the K-12 educational system fails boys.

Speaker 2 Kudos to those governors like Wes Moore in Maryland and Spencer Cox in Utah who have noticed. Even when men do enroll in college, they're much less likely to get a degree.

Speaker 2 Too much male talent is being left on the table. This is why 30 or or so institutions have already joined a new initiative I'm helping lead, the Higher Education Male Achievement Collaborative.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 The fear is that with so many more college-educated women than men, marriage rates will plummet.

Speaker 2 I've always been skeptical of this argument. For one thing, women overtook men in higher education back in the 1980s.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 There is also some evidence from European countries that hypergamy declines as gender equality increases.

Speaker 2 Because this is an empirical question, I commissioned an empirical study.

Speaker 2 The resulting paper by Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, and Joseph Winkelman uses data from Opportunity Insights, a team of researchers and policy analysts at Harvard led by economist Raj Chetty.

Speaker 2 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 BA.

Speaker 2 As a result, a huge class gap in marriage has opened up. As the authors of the study write for AIBM, quote,

Speaker 2 The stable marriage outcomes for college-educated women sharply contrast with the significant decline in marriage rates among women without a BA over the past half century.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Unquote.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 College educated women born in 1950 were as likely as those born in 1980 to marry a man without a degree.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Maybe some of the 30% of those women with a BA but no wedding ring would be more inclined to marry if there were more college-educated men around.

Speaker 2 The stability of the marriage trend suggests not, however. It looks like they just don't want to marry, period.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But, of course, education is only one marker of marriageability and status.

Speaker 2 It turns out that money matters a lot, too.

Speaker 2 Men who have a college-educated wife, even though they don't have a BA 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 The earnings premium among men who marry up educationally has gotten bigger over time.

Speaker 2 This shows that women with a degree are willing to marry men without one, so long as they're making decent money.

Speaker 2 Women might marry down in terms of education, but not in terms of earnings.

Speaker 2 The good news here is that economically viable men have decent marriage prospects, and that women with degrees can find a good man.

Speaker 2 The bad news is that men doing badly in the labor market are likely to struggle in the marriage market too.

Speaker 2 The paper finds that in areas where working class men are doing better, marriage rates go up, cutting the marital class gap in half.

Speaker 2 Making men more economically viable, to use one of Scott's favorite terms, turns out to be the key to improving marital prospects. There's a corrosive downward spiral at work right now.

Speaker 2 As the economic prospects of men without a college degree decline, marriage rates fall.

Speaker 2 That leaves millions more men and women without a partner to share the responsibilities and benefits of family life.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 They become more vulnerable to addiction, more socially isolated, all of which makes them less attractive as potential spouses.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And so the cycle turns. The economic struggles of boys and men become entrenched across generations.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Pooling incomes into a single household is obviously optimal, but from an economic perspective, especially for those with the lowest incomes who are now the least likely to marry.

Speaker 2 Some scholars suggest that the class gap in marriage can explain much of the decline in social mobility in recent decades.

Speaker 2 Concerns about marriage should then be focused on men and women with less educational attainment and or worsening economic outcomes.

Speaker 2 The problem is not that your daughter graduating from Amherst or Berkeley won't find a man good enough for her.

Speaker 2 The problem is that a woman in Appalachia or the Bronx won't find a man she sees as worth marrying.

Speaker 2 The best pro-marriage anti-poverty strategy is simple.

Speaker 2 Improve the economic prospects of working class and lower income men.

Speaker 2 Simple does not mean easy, of course.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But it's clear where to start

Speaker 2 with the boys and men.

Speaker 2 Life is so rich.

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