Smart but Single

“How the B.A. Gap Widens the Chasm between Men and Women” by Andrew Hacker, in The Chronicle of Higher Education (June 20, 2003), 1255 23rd St., N.W., Washington, D.C. 20037.

The growing gender gap on America’s campuses may be ushering in a new era of life without marriage for educated women, contends Hacker, a political scientist at New York City’s Queens College. It’s happened before, though on a smaller scale: Through the early decades of the 20th century, graduates of women’s colleges such as Vassar, Wellesley, and Bryn Mawr were less likely to wed. (“Only our failures marry,” M. Carey Thomas, a legendary Bryn Mawr president, defiantly proclaimed.)

Though, as Hacker notes, the term spinster “has disappeared, as has a presumption of celibacy,” the gendered disparity in numbers is a fact: For every 100 women who received a bachelor’s degree last year, only 75 men did. The gap, he says, is making it harder for educated women to find equally educated mates.

Not so long ago, he points out, the collegiate sexual tables were turned: For every 100 men who obtained a college degree in 1960, only 54 women did. Such women were more likely to find husbands who’d also graduated, and the surplus of college-educated males meant that women who’d skipped higher education had a better chance of “marrying up.” Secretaries wed young executives; nurses wed doctors.

Today, however, it is men who increasingly “marry up”: Nearly 40 percent of married female graduates ages 25 to 34 have less educated husbands. But many educated women these days are unwilling to “marry down,” Hacker asserts. “As more and more women have experienced higher education, they have developed higher expectations about what they want from life”—and set “higher standards” for potential husbands.

“[Women] have always had what it takes to be good students,” writes Hacker, “and expanding opportunities over the last century have given them the chance to demonstrate that.” But as it almost always does in life, success exacts a toll. Among Americans who earn more than $100,000 a year, 83 percent of the men are married, but only 58 percent of the women.