μ · EP 008 · June 22, 2026

College Women Kept Marrying. Everyone Else Didn't.

tl;dr

The college gender gap didn't hurt college women's marriage rates. It shifted who was available to non-college women through two distinct channels. College women adapted by matching with high-earning men without degrees. The share of college-educated women in cross-education marriages quadrupled. A new NBER paper documents the mechanism across 50 birth cohorts.

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