Sex ratios as if not everyone is a college graduate

Quick: What percentage of 22-to-29-year-old, never-married Americans are college graduates? Not sure? Just look around at your friends and colleagues.

Actually, unlike among your friends and colleagues, the figure is only 27.5% (as of 2010). Yep, barely more than a quarter of singles in their 20s have finished college. Or, as the headlines for the last few days would have it: basically everyone.

The tweeted version of this Washington Post Wonkblog story was, “Why dating in America is completely unfair,” and the figure was titled “Best U.S. cities for dating” (subtitle: “based on college graduates ages 22-29”). This local news version listed “best U.S. cities for dating,” but never even said they were talking about college graduates only. The empirical point is simple: there are more women than men among young college graduates, so those women have a small pool to choose from, so we presume it’s hard for them to date.* (Also, in these stories everyone is straight.) In his Washington Post excerpt the author behind this, Jon Birger, talks all about college women. The headline is, “Hookup culture isn’t the real problem facing singles today. It’s math.” You have to get to the sixth paragraph before you find out that singles means college and post-college women.

In his Post interview the subject of less educated people did come up briefly — if they’re men:

Q: Some of these descriptions make it sound like the social progress and education that women have obtained has been a lose-lose situation: In the past women weren’t able to get college educations, today they can, but now they’re losing in this other realm [dating]. Is it implying that less educated men are still winning – they don’t go to college but they still get the pick of all these educated, more promiscuous women?

A: Actually, it’s the opposite. Less educated men are actually facing as challenging a dating and marriage market as the educated women. So for example, among non-college educated men in the U.S. age 22 to 29, there are 9.4 million single men versus 7.1 million single women. So the lesser-educated men face an extremely challenging data market. They do not have it easy at all.

It’s almost as if the non-college-educated woman is inconceivable. She’s certainly invisible. The people having trouble finding dates are college-educated women and non-college-educated men. By this simple sex-ratio logic, it should be raining men for the non-college women. Too bad no one thought to think of them.

Yes, the education-specific sex ratio is much better for women who haven’t been to college. That is, they are outnumbered by non-college men. But it’s not working out that well for them in mating-market terms.

I can’t show dating patterns with Census data (and neither can Birger), but I can show first-marriage rates — that is, the rate at which never-married people get married. Here are the education-specific sex ratios, and first-marriage rates, for 18-34-year-old never-married women in 279 metropolitan areas, from the 2009-2011 American Community Survey.** Blue circles for women with high school education or less, orange for BA-holders (click to enlarge):

Note that for both groups marriage rates are lower for women when there are more of them relative to men — the downward sloping lines (which are weighted by population size). Fewer men for women to choose from, plus men eschew marriage when they’re surrounded by desperate women, so lower marriage rates for women. But wait: the sex ratios are so much better for non-college women — they are outnumbered by male peers in almost every market, and usually by a lot. Yet their marriage rates are still much lower than the college graduates’. Who cares?

I don’t have time to get into the reasons for this pattern; this post is media commentary more than social analysis. But let’s just agree to remember that non-college-educated women exist, and acknowledge that the marriage market is even more unfair for them. Imagine that.***

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* I once argued that this could help explain why gender segregation has dropped so much faster for college graduates.

** It was 296 metro areas but I dropped the extreme ones: over 70% female and marriage rates over 0.3.

*** Remember, if we want to use marriage to solver poverty for poor single mothers, we have enough rich single men to go around, as I showed.

A little code:

I generated the figure using Stata. I got the data through a series of clunky Windows steps that aren’t easily shared, but here at least is the code for making a graph with two sets of weighted circles, each with its own weighted linear fit line, in case it helps you:

twoway (scatter Y1 X1 [w=count1], mc(none) mlc(blue) mlwidth(vthin)) ///

(scatter Y2 X2 [w=count2], mc(none) mlc(orange_red) mlwidth(vthin)) ///

(lfit Y1 X1 [w=count1], lc(blue)) ///

(lfit Y2 X2 [w=count2], lc(orange_red)) , ///

xlabel(30(10)70) ylabel(0(.1).3)