College women are snapping up the highest-earning men without college degrees, leaving the rest further behind

For decades, the story of American higher education has been about women pulling ahead. Now a new study shows that shift is also reshaping who marries whom—and it’s women without college degrees who are paying the price.

Fortune has been chronicling how money shapes marriage since long before this study — the magazine’s Julie Connelly coined the term “trophy wife” itself in a 1989 cover story, a phrase that’s since become an inescapable shorthand across pop culture for wealth-driven pairings. Now, new research suggests the more consequential story about marriage and money is happening in the opposite direction: not among the wealthy elite, but in the widening gap between non-college women and the shrinking pool of “marriageable” men.

A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper tracked marriage patterns across U.S. birth cohorts from 1930 to 1980 and found that college-educated women have kept their marriage rates stable even as their pool of similarly educated men shrank dramatically. The ratio of college men to college women fell from 1.8 to 0.8 over that span, and there are now 1.6 million more women than men enrolled in four-year colleges nationwide, according to the study by economists Clara Chambers of Yale, Benjamin Goldman of Cornell, and Joseph Winkelmann of Harvard.

“Four-year college rates for men stagnated essentially many decades ago, whereas for women, it’s been a steady increase,” Goldman told Fortune. “That’s really been the key factor that’s led to the changing ratio over time.”

The paper, “Bachelors Without Bachelor’s: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates,” complicates the mutation of the “trophy wife” era into the “power couples” era: as wealthy Americans increasingly marry within their own income and education tier. This new research shows the opposite pattern playing out further down the income ladder, where college-educated women are increasingly pairing with men who skipped college altogether.

The shift also reflects the labor market of the era, Goldman said. Well-paying, often unionized manufacturing jobs once let men build a solid living without a four-year degree, while fields that have drawn more women, like nursing and teaching, increasingly required one.

College women adapted by marrying down. The share of marriages in which the wife has a four-year degree and the husband doesn’t has quadrupled, from 2.3% of all women in the 1930 birth cohort to 9.6% in the 1980 cohort. Crucially, they’re marrying the highest earners without college degrees, whose incomes rose from an average of $61,400 to $68,400. Non-college men who didn’t marry a........

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