Posted on 09/12/2019 8:18:01 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
America is facing a significant shortage of highly educated “economically attractive” unmarried men who earn at least $53,000 and have a college degree. And the situation could result in unmarried women remaining unmarried or marrying less well-suited partners, a study says.
That’s the conclusion reached by researchers Daniel T. Lichter of Cornell University, Joseph P. Price of Brigham Young University, and Jeffrey M. Swigert of Southern Utah University in their study, Mismatches in the Marriage Market, published this month in the Journal of Family and Marriage.
The results of the study were based on comparisons between real data on unmarried men and a synthetic profile of the ideal husband that the average unmarried woman desired, created from marriage data from 2008 to 2012 and 2013 to 2017 recorded in the American Community Survey.
“These synthetic husbands have an average income that is about 58% higher than actual unmarried men who are currently available to unmarried women. They also are 30% more likely to be employed (90% vs. 70%) and 19% more likely to have a college degree (30% vs. 25%),” the study says.
“Our analyses provide clear evidence of an excess supply of men with low income and education and, conversely, shortages of economically attractive unmarried men (with at least a bachelor’s degree and higher levels of income) for women to marry. One implication is that promoting good jobs may ultimately be the best marriage promotion policy rather than marriage education courses that teach new relationship skills,” the researchers conclude.
In an interview with The Christian Post on Tuesday, Price explained that the disparity between the characteristics unmarried women are looking for in a life partner and their available choices in reality have created “a structural mismatch” starkly highlighted in their research.
“The important contribution that our paper made was just to document the structural mismatch and the kind of men on average that women are looking for and the kind of men that are currently available for them," Price said. "So our best guess among the unmarried women in our sample, they are hoping to marry someone whose average income is $53,000, but if you look at the average income among the potential partners they can choose from, it's about $35,000. So this $18,000 gap creates a bit of a structural mismatch.”
Challenge of minority women
While all unmarried women face the challenge of finding suitable marriage partners, the study highlights that this challenge is particularly acute for minority women and black women especially. Unmarried Women from both low socioeconomic backgrounds as well as those with high socioeconomic status also have an especially hard time finding suitable partners.
“High rates of incarceration and substantial out-marriage to white women, especially among black men, have also left many minority women without marital partners. The fact that women’s educational levels now exceed men’s further implies that young women—by necessity—are less financially dependent on husbands than in the past and that educational hypogamy has become more commonplace,” the study says.
Among Christian women and those of other faiths where women are expected to marry in order to pursue intimate relationships, Price said there might have to be a cultural shift from hypergamy — where women tend to marry up — to one of hypogamy — where they marry below their standards.
“Hypergamy is this pattern we observe in data in which women tend to marry men with a higher level of education. And given that women now constitute about 60 percent of the college degrees, what you’ll probably start to see in faith communities is an erosion of the hypergamy norm, in which case women are OK marrying a husband who has less education than her. That’s one solution to the problem within a faith community,” Price said.
When asked about men who have invested in trade schools to acquire skills such as plumbing or carpentry, Price noted that that alternative route is also a solution for unmarried men to increase their stock, but the current data show unmarried women have a stronger preference for men with college degrees.
“I think that’s another solution too. It’s kind of a renewal of the dignity of work, which is that someone who has a skill, has a trade, and is able to work hard will be able to support a family even if they do not have a college degree,” he said.
A long-term response to improve the marriage prospects of the current crop of economically and educationally undesirable single men is to change the culture.
“We might have to change that norm, where the potential spouses actually can make a living through these other routes. Those are the alternative pathways to having a good life and a steady income,” he says.
Changing the culture
While alternative solutions to help single men lift their income so that they are more in line with the current desired spouses of unmarried women, changing the culture from hypergamy to one of hypogamy will be a lot more difficult.
“I don’t know how you change the norm — that you can have a happy marriage and a successful marriage with someone who is earning much less than you’re hoping to find. I don’t have a solution to that,” he says.
When asked what advice he would give to Christians facing this situation, Price said marriage can sometimes help men improve their status in life.
“I guess on a personal level I would say that marriage changes people in positive ways and it’s quite possible that, over time in a strong marriage, both the husband and wife will grow in their skills and talents,” he said.
There are men, he explained, “who through marriage have been able to improve their prospects at work, seek more education or seek additional training, try to get those promotions. Try to earn more.
“What we’re seeing is that the unmarried men, as they are right now, we can’t know for sure what their potential is going to be if they were in a lasting and committed marriage,” Price noted.
Not many women appear willing to budge on their standard, however, so Price suggested that churches can play a more integral role in helping men improve their prospects as potential partners for the crop of ambitious women.
“I think we have to take more seriously the charge as a faith community to encourage our young men to get the education, get the training they need to be successful in a career so they can be in a position to support a family and be attractive as a potential partner in a marriage,” he said.
Selectivity
In The Coming Divorce Decline, published last September, University of Maryland sociology professor Philip Cohen shows that better educated women 44 years old and younger tended to have more lasting marriages than their older counterparts because they were more selective in their choice of partners. He also noted that this selectivity has resulted in marriage becoming rarer and reflective of social inequality.
“Marriage is become more selective, and more stable, even as attitudes toward divorce are becoming more permissive, and cohabitation has grown less stable. The U.S. is progressing toward a system in which marriage is rarer, and more stable, than it was in the past, representing an increasingly central component of the structure of social inequality,” Cohen notes in his analysis.
“Over the last decade, newly married women have become more likely to be in their first marriages, more likely to have bachelor's degrees or higher education, less likely to be under age 25, and less likely to have grown children in the household — all of which suggests falling risk of divorce,” he continues.
In discussing the trend with Bloomberg, Cohen explained that marriage today is becoming more of an “achievement of status” for those who choose it.
“Marriage is more and more an achievement of status, rather than something that people do regardless of how they’re doing,” Cohen said.
“The change among young people is particularly striking,” Susan Brown, a sociology professor at Bowling Green State University, told Bloomberg in response to Cohen’s analysis. “The characteristics of young married couples today signal a sustained decline [in divorce rates] in the coming years.”
Many poorer and less educated Americans are often in cohabiting relationships with children. Those relationships are seen as less stable.
A study conducted in 2016 by Barna shows that a majority of Americans now believe in cohabitation due to pressures like shifting gender roles and expectations, the delay of marriage, and a secularizing culture.
My brother is a lineman who never graduated high school and he easily does 200k a year.
I opted for marriage at a very early age, but I can't imagine that romps with lots of partners can substitute for the joy of raising children and growing old with the love of your life.
Skilled labor makes good money in my area. Well above the threshold mentioned in the article.
Watched my wife’s sister run her marriage into the ground and pretty much destroy the life of her husband. Very women have earned their divorce as much as she did.
Husband was a successful and basically decent guy and good husband- just never near good enough in her eyes.
She got near six figure alimony in the divorce when she in truth deserved to be horse whipped for her disgusting and abusive behavior.
For nearly a decade husband had to watch her ignore their kids while she took the alimony and blew it riding around on the back of bad boy’s Harley’s and spending her alimony treating a succession of toy boys who were up front that they had no interest in any relationship but were just in it for lavish, expensive road trips where she was paying the bills
No way was she going to get married and lose that gravy train
Pretty hard to take but he said it was worth 10 times the cost to get rid of her. He’s been very happily married now for quite some years and their kids are doing great
She’s not doing quite so well and their kids are a hot mess thanks to her neglect
Needless to say, her family still bad mouths the guy like he was the worst husband and biggest loser on earth.
His second wife strongly dissents and still feels like she won the lottery even after all the time they have been married
Moral of story
Our culture seems produce an excess of seriously immature, abusive and incredibly toxic members of both sex but that does not mean there are not still a lot of good people out there looking to rebuild their lives after having their lives uprooted and ruined by one of the toxic ones
I have no problem with those with STEM college degrees making good wages. Some stock traders make much more profits than any STEM graduate will ever make. Trading profits (where very little useful product is produced) and Hollywood celebrities and some ball players make unjustified wages based on useful products, but at least there is demand for entertainment worldwide.
Therefore IMHO the only unjustified earnings are those of stock traders. I made 3 times as much trading stocks than my work as engineer with a masters degree, working for 37 years.
Traveling to storm damaged areas and getting overtime or double overtime helps a lot. Also, that twenty-six eighty-six is an avarage. Many make more than that.
And since women in HR control the hiring decisions, they pretty much favor women exclusively. It’s a girls club. Men need not apply. Here where I live there is a push to get women into construction jobs. When they start filling more and more jobs with women, men will have few career opportunities. This affirmative action crap has got to stop.
Words to live by, for sure
This is because our society gave women more economic opportunity, legal rights and social status. You reap what you sow.
Agree totally.
So we’re only good for our money? I had that sneaking suspicion.
Let’s see how to go about solving this problem. Make job opportunities EQUAL for men and women. Same for college admissions. Eliminate the minority set-aside whereby governments illegally and unjustly favor women and minorities in government contracting. Start there and get back to me when that’s done.
My heart goes out to the people who would like to marry and can’t find someone. I think the cultures where family members are on the lookout for potential spouses have a good idea there. Not all families know best, some don’t, but meeting people through people who know and love you seems a lot better than going to a bar.
Probably because most of these searching for $$$$ are educated far beyond their intelligence.
“No kidding! Finding a decent and successful enough man is not an easy task these days!”
This has been going for at least 6 decades. I had great jobs in the summer, and a lot good part time jobs in high school and college.
My Dad was a disabled vet on a pension, and my mother was a school teacher.
No problem getting dates in college, shortly after discovering that I was not from a wealthy family. I became a lost cause for most of the females looking for a rich hubby instead of a good degree. After they found out that I was not from a rich family, they moved on or put me in neutral.
I was one of the first in my college senior year to get a good job offer from a big company. The Company’s data and my monthly salary was posted on a bulletin board outside of the dean’s office.
A recent phone call from my roommate my senior year in college drove that point home. He answered my call to him as, “Hello to the guy with the $450 /month job offer his senior year in college in 1960!”
He laughed and retold, how he and my other room mate joked about standing guard and charging admission for the college girls suddenly interested in me, not my room mates.
That continued until I quit that job after graduation. For about 4 weeks, I became a leper. Then, I got another and even better paying job. Suddenly, I became very popular with women I had known or just met.
Flash forward a few decades and a younger relative, a chef, in his 40’s left Portland and moved back to California. He ended up in the wine industry and held two top jobs with his new company. He moved to a smaller town near the winery and started dating.
He felt that the women, who came on to him were validating his credit report and Dun and Bradstreet rating. He had made friends with an older female psychologist, and she confirmed his feelings.
He is a handsome and very smart young man. He actually did a small cameo movie role for an established Hollywood actor while living in Portland. He had one of these prospective gold diggers, who while in bed with him asked him how much he had in his 401K.
His free psychologist lined him up with a great woman, who had the local male gold diggers after her. That will be 2 years ago in a few weeks. They are a great couple.
So things have not changed in 6 decades.
They will be even more intense with guys with IUDs/Instant Unemployment Degrees.
And guys, your wife gets half so your scheme won’t work
Amen. Stupid people can NOT fix cars, air conditioners, and all the stuff of modern life. In this millennium it’s all technologically advanced. We need to get over blue collar stereotypes.
My wife is younger than I, and every now and then I tease her that when I get old she’ll be leaving me for a younger man.
Her response is - “No - older and richer”.
MPAI.
My current work brings me into intermittent contact with attractive american women, some of whom over time become divorced. The story then frequently becomes that they had been in “abusive relationship(s)”. They then get loads of emotional support from their 30 something attractive american woman peer group, and then so far as i can tell go on romps with a succession of playboys.
I had an uncle who likewise was divorced. He had to pay child support and alimony, which he did faithfully.
His ex had a sister who also got divorced from her husband. He was a police officer. She made an allegation that he had sexually abused his kids. This was a huge scandal locally and was all over the news. After some time it was determined that the charges were groundless, but his life and career were already ruined.
My uncle saw this and did not want to take the risk of the sister he was married to doing the same. He continued to pay till his kids turned 18, but never had any further contact with them. He was too afraid.
At some point his ex remarried, which should have ended the alimony. Except that she neglected to tell the court. She had been married about two years when his attorney discovered by accident that she had gotten hitched again.
They dragged her to court. The judge gave a stern finger-wagging lecture about how she should have told them, but did not make her repay the money. He did however end the alimony.
She turned around and filed for an increase in child support that was EQUAL TO THE DOLLAR AMOUNT she had just lost in the revoked alimony.
The courts GAVE it to her.
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