Dating Disasters

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Pointed out by James Freeman of The WSJ in his “Best of the Web” column:

Kara Miller writes in the Boston Globe about a striking demographic trend:

Author and journalist Jon Birger started to sense that there was something horribly wrong with dating when he was a senior writer at Fortune Magazine in the early 2000s. Normally, he covered markets: oil, agriculture, stocks. But at his workplace, Birger says, “I couldn’t help but notice that all the guys were either married like myself, or in long-term relationships. Whereas the women at Fortune — who I think I can safely say had more going for them than we guys did — they were disproportionately single.”

At first, he wondered if there was something strange about his workplace. But his wife, a lawyer, found her experience mirrored his. “Particularly if you live in a city like Boston or New York, you just know all these fabulous single women in their 30s and 40s who can’t seem to meet a half-decent guy,” he said.

So Birger, who knew a strange market when he saw one, went hunting for data. At first, he thought this was a big-city problem. But, as it turned out, this wasn’t about jobs or about big cities. It was about college… women now outnumber men on college campuses. And not by a little. About 60 percent of US college students are now women; only 40 percent are men. The last time there was parity, Birger says, was back in the 1980s.

And the reality is that people who have college degrees tend to date other people with college degrees. But that tendency leads to a numerical mismatch, which, for both white-collar women and blue-collar men, can have profound consequences.