Kevin Carey calls a recent Daily Caller article by Kay Hymowitz ?generally silly? and ?an alarmed reaction to female college attainment.? No, the piece is none of those things. It is a short discussion of American marriage trends: Hymowitz asks whether women, as they attain ever higher levels of education (57 percent of this year's college graduates are females), will ?be willing to marry ?down'??that is, to marry men who possess fewer diplomas and degrees. The author then answers her own question: Probably not. Her subsequent analysis isn't particularly convincing, but neither is it ?silly? or ?alarmed.? The article is mostly just dull?it makes a point that has been made many, many times, by Hymowitz and others.
Carey is on sturdier ground when he attacks Hymowitz for writing this: ?It also explains why, though we don't have solid research distinguishing between elite and State U mating choices, Ms. Harvard will probably not accept a proposal from Mr. Florida State.? Though it's true that incoming freshmen at Harvard have higher SAT scores than their FSU counterparts, Carey notes that Harvard is also much smaller than FSU, which enrolls some 31,000 undergraduates to Harvard's 6,600. ?The top 25 percent of Florida State constitutes roughly 7,700 students,? he writes, ?for whom the lower bound SAT Math score is 650. That means that the median SAT score among top Florida State students (the precise numbers aren't available) is probably up around 700.? Harvard's median math score is about 750. Were one to compare the 6,600 highest-SAT-scoring Seminoles to Harvard's student body, Carey believes one would find ?a lot of cognitive overlap.?
It's a nice bit of reasoning, but the comparison just doesn't work. A Harvard freshman with an SAT Math score of 730 (pretty low among his college peers) may have pulled out a perfect score on the verbal section and had several short stories published in the Paris Review, while the FSU freshman with the 730 math score (pretty high among his college peers) may be a budding engineer who has never heard of an apostrophe much less witnessed one its natural habitat. Point is: There's no way to know.
Carey's interpretation also considers only SAT scores, which Hymowitz never mentions. When Ms. Harvard rejects Mr. Florida State, the College Board may be the last thing on her mind. Perhaps she's thinking about stuff like ambition (?I went to the best school in the land; he went to the school with the best-looking women in the land?) and prestige? Or maybe she's thinking that she's just worldlier and sharper than Mr. Florida State, who got a high SAT score, sure, but has never been to Europe and hasn't read Hamlet and has no particular desire to do either. Or maybe Ms. Harvard just believes that she went to an Ivy League school, damn it, and ought to be marrying someone who did the same. Point is: There's no way to know.
I tend to think that Ms. Harvard could probably find a Mr. Florida State with whom she'd be delighted to spend her life. It may be trickier for a Ms. Harvard, or a Ms. Florida State, to find a Mr. No College about whom she feels similar. But who knows? At the end of the day the fact that more American women are?getting more education is a wonderful thing. Both Carey and Hymowitz would agree with that statement, and both would also agree that any marital challenges that result from the many-females-in-college trend barely blemish it.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow