The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
No Mercy / No Malice: Marrying Up and Marrying Down
Sat, 01 Mar 2025
Written by Richard Reeves. As read by George Hahn. https://www.profgalloway.com/marrying-up-and-marrying-down/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
I'm Sky Galloway and this is No Mercy, No Malice. What's the new luxury item? Marriage. Marrying Up and Marrying Down, as read by George Hahn.
Chapter 2: Why are college campuses seeing a gender shift?
This post was written by Richard Reeves. 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. Now it is the other way around. There are 2.5 million fewer male than female undergraduates. There is an even bigger gender gap in master's degrees. Does this matter?
Chapter 3: How does the gender education gap affect the labor market?
After all, the massive educational advance of women and girls is rightly seen as a cause for celebration rather than lamentation. Given that men still out-earn women, there's an argument to be made that women need to out-learn men, just to keep up in the labor market. I think it does matter. For one thing, it highlights how the K-12 educational system fails boys.
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. Too much male talent is being left on the table. This is why 30 or so institutions have already joined a new initiative I'm helping lead. The Higher Education Male Achievement Collaborative.
Chapter 4: Does the college gender gap impact marriage rates?
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. 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.
The fear is that with so many more college educated women than men, marriage rates will plummet. I've always been skeptical of this argument. For one thing, women overtook men in higher education back in the 1980s. 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.
Chapter 5: What are the findings of the study on marriage and hypergamy?
There is also some evidence from European countries that hypergamy declines as gender equality increases. Because this is an empirical question, I commissioned an empirical study. The resulting paper, by Clara Chambers, Benjamin Goldman and Joseph Winkelmann, uses data from Opportunity Insights, a team of researchers and policy analysts at Harvard, led by economist Raj Chetty.
Marriage rates among college-educated women have been rock steady at around 70% for decades, at least since World War II. As the authors of the study write for AIBM, quote, Unquote. Das einfache Mathematik bedeutet, dass einige Frauen mit Hochschulabschlägen Männer ohne Hochschulabschläge verheiraten müssen. Das ist genau das, was das Buch findet.
Eine in fünf hochschulabschlänglichen Frauen verheiraten einen Mann ohne vierjähriges Abstand. Was mehr überraschend ist, ist, dass dies immer der Fall war, lange bevor das große Bildungsübertragung. College-educated women born in 1950 were as likely as those born in 1980 to marry a man without a degree.
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. 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.
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. Die Stabilität der Beziehungstrende zeigt jedoch nicht. Es sieht so aus, als würden sie sich nicht mehr verheiratet. In den interessantesten Paaren aus der kulturellen Perspektive hat die Frau mehr Bildung als der Mann.
Auf den ersten Blick ist das die ganze Idee von Hypergamy. Aber natürlich ist Bildung nur ein Marker von Beziehungsfähigkeit und Status. Es scheint, dass Geld auch sehr wichtig ist. Männer, die eine berufliche Frau haben, auch wenn sie keine BA haben, in anderen Worten, Männer, die in beruflichen Terminen verheiratet sind, machen viel mehr Geld als andere Männer mit ähnlichen Bildungsleveln.
Von denen, die 1980 geboren wurden, machen Männer, die verheiratet sind, 68.000 Dollar pro Jahr, verglichen mit den 46.000 Dollar pro Jahr, die Männer, die entweder eine Frau verheiratet haben ohne Degret oder überhaupt nicht verheiratet haben. The earnings premium among men who marry up educationally has gotten bigger over time.
This shows that women with a degree are willing to marry men without one, so long as they're making decent money. Women might marry down in terms of education, but not in terms of earnings. The good news here is that economically viable men have decent marriage prospects and that women with degrees can find a good man.
The bad news is that men doing badly in the labor market are likely to struggle in the marriage market too. The paper finds that in areas where working class men are doing better, marriage rates go up, cutting the marital class gap in half. making men more economically viable, to use one of Scott's favorite terms, turns out to be the key to improving marital prospects.
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