‘We should absolutely be concerned about non-college-educated men today’: higher rents, living at home, falling out of the labor market

Men are nearly twice as likely as women to be living with their parents, and a new study says it’s particularly harmful for non-college educated men, who are less likely to hold jobs compared to their college-educated counterparts.

As rents have surged across the country, more and more men are moving home, and once there, many stop working. In fact, one in six non-college men (16%) now live with their parents, compared to 8% of college-educated men. A new working paper from Gabrielle Penrose, a graduate student fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men, follows six decades of U.S. Census data and draws a direct line between rising housing costs and the decline of male labor force participation.

“There are very real economic forces that are limiting the options for non-college-educated men in the United States,” Penrose told Fortune. “Some of what we’re seeing is simply rational responses to a system that’s pricing them out.”

Since 1960, real rents in the United States have risen 150%. Over that same period, wages for men without college degrees have barely moved, thanks to automation, globalization, and the collapse of manufacturing. Penrose’s paper details that when rents rise, more Americans are forced back into the parental home. Men move home at nearly twice the rate of women. And non-college-educated men who end up there, the data shows, are increasingly dropping out of the workforce altogether.

For Scott Winship, a senior fellow and the director of the Center on Opportunity and Social Mobility at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the issue is doubly concerning because non-college-educated men may face more disadvantages today than what they would have experienced in the ’60s when Penrose first started looking.

“Today, there are many fewer non-college men than there were a generation ago, and so we should absolutely be concerned about non-college-educated men today,” Winship told Fortune. “They are a more disadvantaged group than they were in previous generations, just because the share of young adults with a bachelor’s degree is up to 40% or so now, versus in the past, when it was much lower. And so that makes me worry.”

Higher rents are forcing people back home

A 10% increase in local rents raises the likelihood that a non-college-educated man moves in with his parents by 1.1 percentage points. Penrose used geographic constraints like mountains, coastlines, and lakes as a research instrument in her paper and found that in areas where terrain limits construction and........

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