Why don't more men join this table?
The New York Times looks at the college dating market and finds men get a great deal when outnumbered by women:
North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students.
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Needless to say, this puts guys in a position to play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a commitment come with storied romantic histories. Rachel Sasser, a senior history major at the table, said that before she and her boyfriend started dating, he had “hooked up with a least five of my friends in my sorority — that I know of.”
This is no surprise and follows from basic supply and demand. It is interesting that this very high price on men isn’t suppressed by men moving from other cities or off-campus or women looking harder for partners outside their classes. The article reports some of this going occurring:
“By my sophomore year, I just had the feeling that there is nobody in this school that I could date,” said Ashley Crisostomo, a senior at Fordham University in New York, which is 55 percent female. She has tended to date older professionals in the city.”
The limits on finding a better partner just by moving, which is called ‘arbitrage’ in economics jargon, would be the willingness of people to engage in long distance relationships with people outside their immediate social circle, and to accept the extra transport costs involved. Just as the ‘law of one price’ breaks down when it’s costly to transport goods between different places or it’s more expensive to do business in one place than another, so might the value of each gender vary in different cities according to how hard those places are to get to and how desirable they are to live in. If university towns are bad places to live for anyone other than university students, then it is there we will find a dating market consistently more favourable for men as few men will be willing to move there and balance things out. In that case we may expect women to apply less often to these universities and more universities to open campuses in existing urban areas.
In cities where the gender ratio is balanced except for the campus, the most important question is whether undergraduate women can find desirable men outside their immediate social circle. With many free and popular internet dating sites in the US it shouldn’t in theory be difficult for compatible (older) men and university attending women to find one another if they are both willing to sign up. I suspect young people are currently reluctant to sign up to Internet dating because in the past it has signalled an unenviable failure to find a mate locally; most will only turn to online dating after persistent failure offline. If this new college dating environment persists, participation in online dating could eventually become a signal of something good: an unwillingness to accept lousy treatment by male undergraduates.
That the surplus of educated women might end up dating less attractive, less educated older men may be a good thing for all concerned as such pairings are correlated with longer lasting and happier marriages.
Tagged: economics, mating strategy
