Single Women: There Aren't Enough College-Educated Men Out There

To be frank, if there legitimately are a glut of women who aren't able to find a "college educated man" (and, frankly, I doubt such a phenomenon exists in reality) then maybe these people will have to settle for men who are simply just successful, college educated or not.

However I highly doubt college graduation numbers has much to do with the women near thirty who are unable to find a partner. I'm sure their standards are just set in such a way as to reduce the dating pool significantly (and I suspect more than just academic background is listed).

PS - This interview gets quite sexist and generalising as you go. They give up even pretending that the numbers are influencing their opinion about halfway down and then it is just purely an opinion piece on "the problem with men these days..."

After talking with a few friends about this, a kind of a non-consensus emerged - men say that women only aim "higher", want more successful, taller, handsome, equally or better educated, "alpha" men; women agree and say that many other women want this, but not them. At the same time, women say that men "lower", and want a women that earns less, isn't more educated, and is submissive; men agree and say many other men might think like this, but not them.

I'm not too sure what to make of this, except that each perspective is necessarily biased. (In the above, "men" and "women" refer to my friends, so a very small sample. Also, I'm only describing the heterosexual view.)

I think this is because society dictates that men who aren't educated and earning lots of money are somehow less attractive. They call it dating 'down'.

Firstly we more women in college.

Secondly guys are less likely to judge their mates by whether they do attend college, so you end up with a dynamic where college educated men are dating both 'up' and 'down' whereas college educated girls only want to date 'up'.

This mentality of dating 'up' based on societies ideals of what 'up' is somehow feels like hypocrisy as many of these girls are staunch feminists.

Why are these non college educated guys not good enough? Are they bad people because they didn't go to college?

Oh well, as a college educated guy, im not complaining.

The problem is probably exacerbated by college educated men being more willing to marry women that aren't college graduates. At least, that's something I think is happening.

This is a supply and demand problem. If the men are in high demand due to low supply, the women need to adjust, whether than means lowering that specific standard, doing without a spouse, or putting more work into the relationship (it's not fair, but I'm talking about reality here, not how we wish things were).

I know a woman medical doctor (a high school classmate of mine) who is married to a man who is a carpenter. (He owns a small home remodeling business.) She seems happy, and she certainly has been married to him for decades now. People don't always have to be matched in level of schooling completion to be good matches for love and for forming a family together. Anyone who has been looking for a spouse for a long time might be well advised to reconsider whether their spouse search criteria are too stringent to be practical.

Reminds me of these two articles in the Atlantic. Both good reads:

"All The Single Ladies" http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/11/all-the-...

"The End of Men" http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-...

I rarely flag a post on the front page, but this really doesn't belong on HN. It brings nothing to the HN community, and is largely just a sexist uneducated highly ignorant rant that just makes women look stupid just for the hilarity of doing so.

Go to San Francisco.

Men underperforming women as students has been going on since at least the nineties. Now those students born in the 90s are adults and can't find men on their educational level to date, and suddenly it's a problem.

As a non-college educated man, I am thankful that this subset of the dating population is not interested in me.

If you make relationship choices based on arbitrary criteria like certificates-of-education you are in for an interesting experience.

Historically, successful men didn't need great relationship skills. They married a woman for that. She brought those things to the table as part of her contribution and he paid the bills. Division of labor.

Women who are college educated, good looking, etc. do not de facto have awesome relationship skills. In fact, you can sort of bet on the idea that if they put their career first, they have probably given short shrift to such things.

The assumption that women who are educated and have successful careers make "great catches" flips the historical standard that what made a man a great catch was his career (not just for the money, but also for the kind of lifestyle that came with the career -- the social circles you run in, among other things) and in order for this to work, men would need to take over the role of tending the relationship: the cooking, the cleaning, being supportive and a good listener, etc.

And that means women would need to start looking for men who invest in that more than their career. They would need to start marrying down.

In essence, the assumption that a woman is a great catch if she has a serious career only works if men are willing to take over the role of "wife" by the droves and the career women are willing to make that deal. Most women still want men who are their equal or superior in terms of career success and income, as the article makes clear.

This isn't a shortage of men. It is a legitimately hard problem to solve to have two career people hook up and also make the personal life part work. A two career couple with kids and a social life, etc. -- there are only so many hours in the day. So this tends to not work.

I have read many, many articles wondering how to make this work and, for me, I think the answer is "My kids are grown adults and I am hitting menopause, so no more babies for me." That means it gets a lot more realistic for me to have a career and also a man in my life with a real career. When you are looking to have a family and make sure all members of the family are properly cared for, it's wicked hard to also have both parents pursuing a serious career with the pedal to the metal.

So I would say these women are choosing career over private life and the law of large numbers mean some of them will just have that career they put everything into. I get why women make that choice. I get why it is hard to be financially dependent upon a man, etc. I did the homemaker and full time mom thing. I know how hard that is. But when push comes to shove, if you just have other priorities, you simply may not get to this one thing that is lower on your list of priorities. Duh.

I'm going to get flak for this, but I've done a lot of online dating and in my experience the "educated women" on these sites tend to be third wave feminists/social justice warriors types who've studied either gender studies, political science, or some other unmarketable degree. I don't know what college does to them, but many are borderline undatable. The unshakable victimhood, the entitlement, the hatred of men makes it nearly impossible to maintain a functional and balanced relationship.

Men have also reached the peak of their disposability. It use to be that we would be sent to war, women and children first etc, now we don't even need to be there as part of the family. Woman can just have a child with male, and when she's done with him, can leave him and force him to pay for that child (which he may now rarely see). So what incentives do men have to make themselves productive members of society if their prospects are so poor.

Not to mention that college campuses have become truly scary places for young men with the ultra politically correct culture (though white men are open season) and the indiscriminate sexual harassment charges (which is deeply unfortunate for those who actually have been harassed since now people are becoming more skeptical).

And when the men turn to social techniques that are proven to increase their sexual market value (aka 'Game'), they get excoriated in the public sphere as 'creeps', 'weirdos', etc. Then we get snarky articles about how 'boring' successful (read: technical/IT-career focused) men have become these days.

I wonder if the interviewer would listen to the interviewee and move to Silicon Valley.

Let me rephrase that as "There aren't enough 6'1 college-educated WASP men who look like football players and are charismatic and extroverted".

College is a scam anyway...

Very few things make me stop reading an article. But, this one won with:

"This isn't China or India where they have a man-made gender imbalance because of all sorts of horrendous things".

What a way to over-generalize 2.5 billion people.

A snide remark like that in a ultra-shallow article. Yeah, I have myself to blame but bleh.