It’s a complaint at least as old as “Sex and the City”: Where are all the good, dateable men? Why are there so many amazing women and so few acceptable mates for them?
For a long time, the conclusions drawn were that women were doing something wrong. Too aggressive, not aggressive enough, not putting themselves out there, putting themselves out there a little too often.
A new book “Date-onomics: How Dating Became a Lopsided Numbers Game” by Jon Birger sets out to show that women aren’t doing anything wrong: There just aren’t enough Mr. Rights to go around.
Birger explains that this is the experience nationally, not just in oft-mentioned dating wastelands like New York City. With more women going to college than ever before, there are only so many baccalaureate bachelors for them to meet and marry.
That seems reasonable at first glance. Hey, if a woman is looking for someone with her level of education, and this is a deal-breaker for her, then sure, there’s a serious shortage of suitable men.
Birger points out that a woman who was 34 in 2007 began college in 1991 when women outnumbered men on college campuses by 10 percent. He notes that “in 2012, 34 percent more women than men graduated 4-year colleges.”
The numbers are indeed daunting. But they obscure a question all of these unmarried college-graduate women should be asking themselves: Why does a degree matter so much, anyway?
In his book “The Higher Education Bubble,” Glenn Reynolds quotes statistics showing that the cost of college has increased 439 percent since 1982. Reynolds’ book discusses the crippling debt many college graduates carry and how many of their degrees make the debt nearly impossible to ever erase.
He describes degrees as a “bubble” set to burst. College enrollment has been decreasing, so far by a modest 2.3 percent per year, but it’s entirely likely that a college degree won’t carry nearly the same weight in the future that it does today.
My first job after I graduated college in 1999, with my dual bachelor of arts degrees in political science and international affairs, was as a paralegal at a pharmaceutical company. I knew nothing about pharmaceuticals or paralegaling, but my expensive piece of paper was all that was needed to get me the job.
If we face the truth, we’ve been using the college degree as shorthand for identifying people who are capable, smart and, for dating purposes, upwardly mobile. A college degree tells us a prospective love interest has worked at something for at least four years and so must have some level of skill and ambition.
There are plenty of college graduates working as baristas at your local coffee shop, of course, but we assume they’re also working on their screenplay and have goals beyond your next half-caf caramel macchiato.
That’s ultimately what women want. It’s not that they need to ensure their future husband took classes like “Shakespeare in Film” or “Calculus for Poets” (both real college credit classes).
It’s that what women continue to look for in men is security — and a college degree goes a long way toward convincing them he can provide that.
We’ve just gotten to a point where it’s unacceptable to admit that, so we use the “college degree” code to say the things we won’t: We want someone with a good job who will take care of us — yes, even if we’re perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves.
It’s not as if women will turn down an entrepreneur, like, say Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates, just because they didn’t finish college. Exceptions will be made.
The sooner society lets go of the college degree as some sort of marker of success, the better the situation for women seeking their mate will become. The numbers won’t seem so jarring and the sad tales of women unable to find their equal will dissipate.
Love shouldn’t have prerequisites. And a four-year college degree — one that often comes saddled with a side of serious relationship-poisoning debt — shouldn’t be the mark of a suitable suitor.