Bachelors Without Bachelor's: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates | NBER
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Bachelors Without Bachelor's: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates
Clara Chambers,
Benjamin Goldman
& Joseph Winkelmann
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Working Paper 35179
DOI 10.3386/w35179
Issue Date May 2026
Over the past half-century, U.S. four-year colleges have shifted from enrolling mostly men to enrolling mostly women, while the economic position of non-college men has weakened markedly. We examine how these changes correspond with the evolving structure of marriage markets across cohorts and places. As college men have become increasingly scarce, college women have maintained stable marriage rates by marrying high-earning non-college men. This shift—combined with the broader economic decline of non-college men—has sharply reduced the pool of economically stable partners available to non-college women: the share of non-college men who earn above the national median and are not married to college women has fallen by more than 50%. Cross-area evidence shows that education gaps in marriage are smaller where non-college men face lower rates of joblessness and incarceration. Taken together, the evidence suggests that deteriorating outcomes for men have primarily undermined the marriage prospects of non-college women.
Acknowledgements and Disclosures
This paper has been invited for revision at “Nature Communications” under the title “Scarcity of college men and the decline in marriage among non-college Americans.” We thank Raj Chetty, John Eric Humphries, John Friedman, Claudia Goldin, Matthew Hall, Elisa Jácome, Melissa Kearney, Kelly Musick, Richard Reeves, Hannes Schwandt, Matthew Staiger, Peter Rich, Jonathan Tebes, Alanna Williams, and Riley Wilson for helpful comments and discussions. This research was funded by the American Institute for Boys and Men and Cornell University. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Benjamin Goldman
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Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman, and Joseph Winkelmann, "Bachelors Without Bachelor's: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates," NBER Working Paper 35179 (2026), https://doi.org/10.3386/w35179.
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Microeconomics
Market Structure and Distribution
Health, Education, and Welfare
Education
Labor Economics
Demography and Aging
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Gender in the Economy
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