A new study documents the collapse of the American marriage market. Everyone is writing about the women left behind. Nobody is asking what happened to the men. That is the more urgent question — and the answer is not economic.
THE MOMENT
A peer-reviewed study published this week by researchers at Cornell and Harvard documents what many Americans have felt for years without being able to name it. There are currently 1.6 million more women than men enrolled in four-year colleges and universities in the United States. These gender gaps in college attendance are now larger than they were in 1972 — the year Title IX was enacted — but in the opposite direction.
The study's conclusion is blunt: the men are missing. Not dead. Not deployed. Not incarcerated in large enough numbers to explain the gap. Simply absent — from higher education, from stable employment, from the institution of marriage, and increasingly from the lives of their own children.
The press has covered this story almost entirely from the perspective of the women left behind. That is an important story. But it is not the most important one.
THE STORY
The study — "Bachelors Without Bachelor's: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates" — traces what happens downstream when men fall behind educationally and economically. The struggles of many American men have created something like a game of musical chairs for women looking to get married. College-educated women have largely maintained high marriage rates, but they've done so by increasingly partnering with men without college degrees — specifically the higher-earning ones in that pool.
Women without a college education are left with a shrinking pool of economically stable husbands. They are still having children, but their marriage rate has plummeted, and many are raising their children alone.
The data on the men underneath this story is equally stark. Since 2011, while female student enrollment has dropped by approximately two hundred thousand, male students have one million fewer enrolled in four-year institutions. At two-year colleges, dropout rates for men now exceed 45%. In early 2025, 89% of men aged 25 to 34 were employed or seeking work — a 700,000-person shortfall compared to 2004. In 2024, the percentage of young men classified as not in employment, education, or training exceeded that of young women by 260,000.
The researchers compare the American situation to France after World War I — when the death of a generation of men disrupted marriage markets for decades. The comparison is analytically useful. But it misses something important. France lost its men to artillery. America did not. The men are still here. The question is what happened to them.
WHAT IT REVEALS
The economic framing of this crisis — men as commodity, marriage as market, scarcity as the problem — is accurate as a description. It is insufficient as a diagnosis.
What the data documents, without naming, is a formation failure. Not an economic failure. Not an educational failure in the narrow sense. A formation failure — the collapse of the institutions and expectations that historically took boys and made them into men who knew what they were for.
Boys are facing unprecedented obstacles to their academic success that begin early in life and compound throughout college and their early careers. School performance data, test scores, college acceptance and dropout rates, and salary data all indicate boys and young men are falling behind. The gap between boys and girls is apparent from very early on — the disparities not only exist across the board from kindergarten all the way to college but are growing over time.
But the problem runs deeper than classroom performance. A boy who graduates, holds a job, and still cannot build a family — who is economically functional but relationally absent, vocationally employed but purposelessly drifting — has not been formed. He has been processed. There is a difference.
The institutions that historically formed men understood that difference. The father who modeled what it meant to carry responsibility. The church that told a young man his life had a purpose larger than his appetites. The community that held him accountable to something and someone beyond himself. The expectation — stated plainly and enforced consistently — that manhood was something achieved, not assumed, and that its achievement required sacrifice, discipline, and commitment to others.
Those institutions did not disappear by accident. They were systematically undermined — by a culture that redefined manhood as performance rather than character, by an educational system structured around compliance rather than calling, and by a therapeutic establishment that medicates restlessness instead of directing it. The men the study cannot find did not vanish. They were never formed.
THE FRAME
The founders were not romantic about human nature. They were precise about it. They understood that a republic could not sustain itself on laws alone — it required citizens formed well enough to govern themselves before they governed anyone else. And they understood that the formation of male character was not incidental to that project. It was central to it.
John Adams wrote that the American experiment required not merely educated men but virtuous ones. Benjamin Rush, one of the republic's most prolific writers on education, argued that the purpose of forming young men was not to produce economically productive citizens but to produce men capable of subordinating their private interests to the common good. George Washington's entire public life was a demonstration of what a formed man looked like — and he was acutely aware that the republic's survival depended on more men like that, not fewer.
The founders built institutions around that understanding. The family formed character first. The church gave that character a theological foundation — an account of what a man is, what he owes, and what he is ultimately accountable to. The civic community gave him a context in which those capacities could be exercised and tested.
What the NBER study documents in economic and demographic terms is what happens when that architecture is removed. The men do not disappear. They drift. Purposeless, unaccountable, disconnected from the institutions that would give their lives direction and weight. The women who cannot find them are not wrong about what they are looking for. They are looking for something the culture stopped producing.
WHAT IT ASKS
The policy conversation around this crisis circles endlessly around the same proposals: more vocational training, better college retention programs, economic incentives for marriage, paternity leave, male-focused mental health initiatives. These are not wrong. Some of them would help.
But none of them addresses the root. A man who has never been told what he is for cannot be fixed by a job training program. A man who has never been held accountable to anything larger than his own preferences will not be reoriented by a tax incentive. Formation is not a policy. It is a practice — enacted over years, inside institutions, by people who are willing to make demands of a young man and stay present long enough to see what those demands produce.
The recovery of the missing men begins where every formation project begins: with a father who shows up, a community that makes demands, and a faith that tells a young man that his life carries weight — not because he has earned it, but because he was made for something. That is not a government program. It is a decision made by men who were formed themselves and are willing to pass it on.
America does not have a marriage market problem. It has a formation problem. And formation problems are not solved from the outside in. They are solved by the people willing to do the work — starting with the man looking at his own life, asking whether he is building something worth inheriting, and deciding that he is.
FURTHER READING
Bachelors Without Bachelor's: Gender Gaps in Education and Declining Marriage Rates — Chambers, Goldman & Winkelmann (2026). The NBER working paper behind the week's coverage — the actual data, not the summary.
Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It — Richard Reeves (2022). The most thorough account of the male formation crisis currently in print. Readable, nonpartisan, and sobering.
THE GUARDIAN'S LENS
The study calls them missing men. That is the right word — but the wrong frame. Missing implies they went somewhere. Most of them never arrived. A culture that dismantled the institutions of male formation, redefined manhood as a social construct, and replaced fathers with programs should not be surprised by the men it is now producing. The data is not a mystery. It is a bill coming due. And the people who can pay it are not in Washington. They are in homes, churches, and communities that still know what a formed man looks like — and are willing to do what it takes to produce one.
Learn more at theguardianscross.org.
About The Guardians' Cross The Guardians' Cross is a formation and cultural engagement ministry helping Americans reclaim their identity, their nation, and their destiny. We publish The American Guardian three times a week — analysis that goes deeper than the headlines. If the ideas in this article resonate, there is more at theguardianscross.org.
