Matthew Yglesias points to a couple of places in the world where there really are fewer men than women — American inner city neighborhoods where prison and murder take their toll, and Iceland where much of the male population is often literally at sea — and then jumps on the much-buzzed-about notion that the higher number of women enrolled in college compared to the lower number of men is a social/dating/marriage/settling catastrophe. (Yglesias, for instance, points to an article in the New York Times, um fashion section that addresses this very serious social issue!)
He also points to a post by big-L Libertarian economist Alex Tabarrok of Marginal Revolution Never one to shy away from evolutionary economist psychology explanations involving hypothetical supermarkets giving away hypothetical $100 bonuses that, Tabarrok claims, perfectly explains “the predictable consequences on dating.”
Yglesias, like many other intelligent people, smells red herring.
...most of the hand-wringing about this seems silly. It would be bizarre to start admitting fewer women to college in order to make it easier for the remaining women to find steady boyfriends. Things like improved labor market opportunities for blue collar women and improved college preparation for low-income men would help resolve the imbalance, but those things would be goals with pursuing even absent the gender balance on campus issue. What’s more, there’s a large-scale shift toward people getting married later that’s rendering a lot of these ideas about meeting your future husband in school obsolete anyway.
There’s a bit of difference between 60-40% women and men in college and 60-40% men period. For instance, yes, if you’re dead set on marrying someone in your econ 101 course then with that sort of on-campus ratio a woman’s going to be at a disadvantage relative to men in the same class.
Probably not so much at an off-campus coffee shop. Or bar. Or church. Or local alt-weekly or on-line personals.
When I was an evidently charming but distinctly non-college-bound young vagabond back in the 1970s I found no more but also no fewer opportunities relationships in women’s-college college towns as general-admission college towns. Nor did other charming but non-college bound young vagabonds in my circle of friends consider their prospects to be better in those places. I know, I know, plural of anecdote is not data and all that but still, 60-40 mixes aren’t anything compared to the three, four, and five to one (straight) women to (straight) men ratios on and near college campuses that had traditionally been women-only back in the day.
