The Hidden Marriage Market

The college sorting machine has replaced traditional arranged marriages

“Incidentally, the marriage market is probably the strongest reason to pay for expensive private schools. Going to Harvard may not get you a better job but almost certainly puts you in an exclusive dating pool for life.”

This is a quote from Bryan Caplan’s superb book, The Case Against Education. He’s alluding to assortative mating, or the trend whereby people tend to personally choose romantic partners who are similar to themselves.

If you live in a WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) society, you almost certainly view personal choice to be a crucial precondition for marriage.

But in many parts of Asia and Africa, leaving such matters to individual choice is often seen as impractical, unnecessary, or even dangerous. In many countries around the world, including parts of China, India, Indonesia, and Nigeria, there often isn’t much choosing going on. Marriages are frequently arranged.

To be clear, most of these countries do recognize the existence of romantic love.

For example, at least 5 percent of marriages in India today are the result of personal choice based on romantic love (i.e., not arranged). Based on a sample from the urban middle class of Mumbai, about 30 percent of marriages among young adults are not arranged.

Interestingly, in many of these non-WEIRD societies, although romantic love before marriage is viewed with suspicion, love after a couple is united is seen as a natural and very-much-hoped-for consequence of an arranged marriage.

As the psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams points out, “Contrary to stubborn anthropological myth, people everywhere fall in love...the idea that romantic love is an invention of Western culture is itself an invention of Western culture.” Romantic love is present in the vast majority of societies.

In western countries, upper-middle-class people have fooled themselves into thinking they have advanced beyond arranged matchmaking. They haven’t.¹

Imagine the type of spouse your typical upper-middle-class parents would want for their kid. Someone smart, conscientious, relatively agreeable, hardworking, ambitious, and so on. These parents want to screen for these attributes to ensure their kid “marries well.” So these parents invite suitors to take IQ tests and disclose the results, gather recommendation letters, divulge their family income, and craft personal statements that convey their background and values.

You probably see where I’m going with this.

Today, colleges and universities function as arranged matchmaking services. Charles Murray’s term of art in Coming Apart is “the college sorting machine.” The mechanism whereby people with distinctive tastes and preferences are brought together into educational institutions and the labor force.

I have wondered if, on some level, parents who stress about getting their kids into a good college are motivated as much by romantic reasons as professional ones. In other words, they want their son or daughter to attain educational and occupational prestige, of course, but they also want (perhaps unconsciously) to put them in an exclusive environment full of attractive prospects, which would increase the likelihood of a stable marriage and healthy grandchildren.

It's true that most college graduates don’t meet their spouse in college. But by graduating, you then, as Caplan notes, enter a refined dating pool for the rest of your life. A study from 2005 that tracked assortative mating in marriages found that if your highest level of education is a high school diploma, your probability of marrying a college graduate is only nine percent. In contrast, if you hold a college degree, your probability of marrying a fellow college graduate is sixty-five percent. This figure is probably higher today.

College brings bright young people together when they are at a point in their lives when they are searching for romantic partners. Grad school adds a further sorting mechanism. The bright young student who graduates at the top of his or her state college. Then goes on to attend a selective law school, and is brought into a truly selective dating pool. Once they enter the labor force, this educational brand brings them into contact with others who have similar resumes.

The traditional four-year college degree is not just a labor market credential. It’s a consumption good for families and graduates that doubles as a social class signifier. The attributes that predict educational success also predict marital stability.

Two of the strongest predictors of long-term romantic stability are intelligence and conscientiousness. Those are also the two strongest predictors of long-term educational and career success. So when colleges screen for those traits, they are also screening for good spouses.  

Interestingly, in many societies, arranged marriages are most likely to occur in higher social strata. This is true in western countries, too, where young people from the wealthier half of society are brought together by the college sorting mechanism.

In his book Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society, Nicholas Christakis summarizes research on arranged marriages in traditional societies:

“To be absolutely sure about the relative amount of love in arranged marriages, we would need to do an experiment in which people were randomly assigned to either find their own partners or have their spouses chosen by their parents. This is clearly impossible. But surveys in nonexperimental (that is, real-world) conditions are nevertheless informative. They have documented that satisfaction in arranged marriages generally is not lower, and is sometimes even higher, than it is in love matches. One study of couples who had been married for an average of ten years found no statistical difference in self-reported ratings on a scale of passionate love between couples in arranged marriages compared to Western-style love matches. Respondents in another small study of couples in arranged marriages from a variety of backgrounds rated their level of love on a scale of 1 to 10. It was 3.9 at the time of marriage and 8.5 twenty years later.”

Parents are probably pretty good at choosing a compatible partner for their children. Today, college serves this function.

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Interestingly, the residential college environment, with its invisible selection processes, gives young people the mistaken impression that compatible relationships are more widely available and replaceable than they truly are. On a college campus, you’re surrounded by people of the same age with similar abilities and interests. That’ll never happen again.

I’ve had many conversations with young people who describe their shock upon entering the workforce and realizing just how much their dating pool has suddenly shrunk. Many of them get on the apps, of course, and either directly select for people with similar education levels as themselves or indirectly select for education because they are drawn to attributes associated with social class (appearance, background, style, travel, etc). But it’s not quite the same as being surrounded in real life with dozens of attractive potential prospects.

Here's a passage from the author Susan Patton, a Princeton alumna who earned some notoriety for her “Princeton Mom” letter wherein she gave advice to current female students:

“For most of you, the cornerstone of your future and happiness will be inextricably linked to the man you marry, and you will never again have this concentration of men who are worthy of you… Of course, once you graduate you will meet men who are your intellectual equal—just not that many of them. And, you could choose to marry a man who has other things to recommend him besides a soaring intellect. But ultimately, it will frustrate you to be with a man who just isn’t as smart as you.”

A decade ago, an article in The Atlantic stated that “If male enrollment falls to 40 percent or below, female students begin to flee.” One reason for this is that in addition to receiving an education, people also want to go to college to meet romantic partners. Sixty percent of college students are now women.

Elite colleges are an exception, as admissions committees put their thumb on the scale for male applicants. Plainly, if a male and female applicant have the same exact qualifications, elite schools are more likely to admit the male in order to ensure gender parity on campus.  

Most colleges, though, are skewing more and more female. As a growing number of people enter college and a smaller share of men make up the student body, these institutions will lose some of their matchmaking power.

It’s already happening. A recent meta-analysis found that the average intelligence of university students and university graduates has dropped to the average of the general population. The college degree is losing its signaling power not only for the labor market, but for assortative mating, too.

1. Thanks to Sam Hinkie for a great conversation last week that brought this idea to mind.