More noncollege-educated men are living at home and falling out of the labor market, forcing a decline in marriages, all thanks to rising rents

There’s a version of American manhood that used to run on a simple script: leave home, get a job, build a life. Now, however—and rather increasingly—men are falling out of the workforce, just as women outnumber them for the third time in history. This, coupled with the lowest labor force participation rate in years, is causing huge concern for economists who are predicting real-world consequences for years to come.

Men are nearly twice as likely as women to be living with their parents, and a new study says it’s particularly harmful for noncollege-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 noncollege men (16%) now live with their parents, compared to 8% of college-educated men. A recent 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 noncollege-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 noncollege-educated men who end up there, the data shows, are increasingly dropping out of the workforce.

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 noncollege-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 noncollege men than there were a generation ago, and so we should absolutely be concerned about noncollege-educated men today,” Winship told Fortune. “They are a more disadvantaged group than they were in previous generations, just because the share of young........

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