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Notes -
Wow, that's a fascinating graph. I was very confused and started writing a comment about how I'd want more recent data than 1980 before forming conclusions, but looking at the paper itself I see that's by birth year.
I guess the issues would be -- does this take account of divorce and remarriage? It's possible there are some serial monogamists here, and some situations that don't necesarrily demonstrate a continuous commitment between one couple over the course of time in which a couple would normally have children. Since we're talking about the effects on childrearing, it also doesn't necessarily take into account whether many of the college-educated women got married, but too late to have children, or more than one child. The way this data is sampled smells kind of fishy to me, because it genuinely just asks whether a woman is married at a certain point, not what the marital history looks like. I would want to see massively more data before we conclude what marriage is like.
But there are some fascinating takeaways there -- in particular, that there is a higher rate of college-educated women being married to non-college men than the rate of college-educated men being married to non-college women. Simple models of hypergamy would predict the opposite. But there does, like you said, seem to be a thing where earning potential (which itself is correlated with a LOT of other social variables) is more important than college degree in attaining marriage for men.
Perhaps I was onto something when I said:
There's simply not enough college-educated men to go around. Women make up over 60% of college grads today and have been a majority of college grads for over 40 years.
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