College-educated women are snapping up the highest-earning men without college degrees, leaving the rest further behind
July 26, 2026
For decades, the story of American higher education has been about women pulling ahead. Now a new study shows that shift is also reshaping who marries whom—and it’s women without college degrees who are paying the price.
Fortune has been chronicling how money shapes marriage since long before this study; the magazine’s Julie Connelly coined the term “trophy wife” in a 1989 cover story, a phrase that’s since become an inescapable shorthand across pop culture for wealth-driven pairings. Now, new research suggests the more consequential story about marriage and money is happening in the opposite direction: not among the wealthy elite, but in the widening gap between noncollege women and the shrinking pool of “marriageable” men.
