This IFS report examines family formation among working-class men, defined as men without college degrees, within the context of distinct employment environments. We also examine differences in married family formation rates between working-class and college-educated men, and the extent to which these differences might be explained by differences in pay, benefits, and stability.
How the Character of Men's Work Is Linked to Their Family Status
Media Coverage
John DiIulio, "The best natalist policy: good jobsThe makings of a second Baby Boom," UnHerd, May 26, 2025
Chris Bullivant, Grant Martsolf, Brad Wilcox, "Is the collapse of blue-collar marriage a foregone conclusion," The Washington Examiner, April 30, 2025
Grant Martsolf, "Good jobs, strong families in working-class America," Family Studies, April 29, 2025
Introduction
Over the last half century, the U.S. economy has shifted, moving away from manufacturing and towards being an information and service economy. The mid-1980s, for instance, were punctuated by news of the closures of major steel manufacturers, including Homestead Works, Aliquippa Works, and Duquesne Works in Pittsburgh, PA, and Republic Works in Youngstown, OH. The closures were part and parcel of a period of massive deindustrialization. Between 1984 and 2004, the U.S. economy lost between 6 and 7 million manufacturing jobs that provided reliable and high-paying employment with good benefits for millions of working-class Americans.
The move away from manufacturing had a significant impact on America’s working class. Real wages of the median Americans with a high school diploma or less (a common measure of “working class”) declined by 11% between 1979 and 2019, while those of the median worker who had finished college increased by 15 percent. Many industrial communities, especially across America’s “Rust Belt,” experienced significant disinvestment and fell into blight. These economic shifts, both in the Rust Belt and nationwide, took a devastating toll. They pushed working-class men’s labor force participation down and led to declines in religious and secular expressions of community life in areas hit hardest by deindustrialization. Families not only broke apart but failed to form. In the wake of this economic dislocation and social breakdown, deaths of despair—that is, deaths from drug overdoses, suicides, and alcoholism—surged among working-class women and especially men.
The transformation of the American economy has been especially impactful on working-class men. As manufacturing receded, employment in service industries surged, especially in healthcare, financial, and information services. Many of these service jobs require a college degree. And most of the significant growth in jobs that do not require a college degree has been concentrated in industries and occupations that are female dominated. Since 1990, the healthcare industry alone has added roughly 9 million jobs to the US economy. Nearly 80% of Americans who do not have a college degree and work in healthcare are women.nbsp;In fact, declines in real wages for working-class workers were concentrated among men; working-class women have seen their real wages rise since 1979.
Over this same period, Americans have also experienced a significant reduction in marriage and family stability. Since 1970, the marriage rate has fallen by more than 60% to the point where only about 1 in 2 adults are married. Declines in marriage and family stability have been especially precipitous for working-class Americans since 1980. For instance, only 39% of non-college-educated Americans ages 18-55 are married, compared to 58% of college-educated Americans.
Our hypothesis in this Institute for Family Studies (IFS) report is that the nature and character of work play a key role in affecting male marriageability. We contend that features of work like job stability, predictable hours, good benefits, and high pay help men to flourish and, in turn, elevate their appeal as husbands. Moreover, we note that class divides in marriage today are driven in part by differences in the character of work, with college-educated men generally benefiting, in terms of marriage and family formation, from jobs that are more stable, predictable, higher status, and remunerative. But we also suspect that the character of work varies among working-class men themselves, such that some jobs among working-class men are more likely to facilitate marriage and family formation than others.
In this report, we examine family formation among working-class men, defined here as men without college degrees, within the context of distinct employment environments. We also examine differences in married family formation rates—measured here in terms of being married with children at home—between working-class and college-educated men, and we investigate the extent to which these differences might be explained by differences in “good job” variables—primarily differences in pay, benefits, and stability. We then explore differences in the rates of married family formation among working-class men by industry and estimate the extent to which differences across industries are explained by the same “good job” variables. We conclude with a discussion of how public policies might better support working-class men in their jobs to improve their family prospects.

Part 1: Family Formation Among Working-class Men
Trends in family formation rates
In this section, using historical Census data from 1980-2021, we discuss recent family formation trends among working-class men.1 Working class throughout this report is operationalized as completion of less than a college education. Here, college education is defined as completion of at least four years of college. Importantly, this is slightly different than the operationalization of “working class” because the measures of educational attainment in historical Census data are slightly different from the CPS data used in subsequent analyses.
There is ample evidence that college-educated Americans are more likely to get married, stay married, and avoid having children out of wedlock. This is partly because more educated men and women have more stable incomes, more shared assets, greater civic supports for their marriages, and networks that are dominated by married peers, as Wilcox argued in Get Married.2
However, this has not always been the case. In fact, before the 1980s, men who did not complete college had higher rates of married family formation compared to those who did complete college. In our analysis of Census data, we found that in 1980, 59% of all prime working-age men (ages 25-55) who did not complete college were married with children living in their homes, compared to 55% of men who did complete college.
Over the course of the next 40 years, all men in America were increasingly less likely to be married and living with children. By 2021, only 37% of prime working-age men were married living with children compared to 58% in 1980 (Figure 1). But the overall decline in married family formation was more significant for men who had not completed college. Over the last 40 years, men who had not graduated from college were now actually less likely than college-educated men to be married and living with their own children. By 2021, 34% of non-college-educated, prime working-age men were married and living with their own children compared to 44% of college-educated men.

We examine more closely family formation rates among working-class men ages 25-55 in 2021 (Table 1). We found that working-class men (33.50%) were much less likely to be married with children living in their homes compared to college-educated men (44.39%). At the same time, they were much more likely to cohabit with children in the home (3.44% vs. 0.93%) and to be living with no partner and without children (41.36% vs. 31.83%).

Part 2: Examining Married Family Formation by Class and the Impact of Good Job Variables
Married family formation rates by class
This section compares all college-educated versus working-class men. We are interested primarily in the links between class, workplace environment, and family status. For this analysis, we use data from the Current Population Survey from years 2021-2024. We used regression models to estimate predicted probabilities of having a married family by education, which we view as a proxy for class. In our sample of 113,656 prime working-age men, we find that working-class men were 8 percentage points less likely than college-educated men to be married and living in the home with their children (Table 2). Regression coefficients used to produce these adjusted rates are shown in Appendix Table A3.

1. Specifically, we use data from 1% sample Census data (1980, 1990, 2000) and the American Community Survey (2010, 2021).