Andrew Yang on marriage: what the evidence says · JRE #1245

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

Marriage rates in the United States have declined substantially since 1960 and diverge sharply by education, with those lacking a four-year degree marrying less than college graduates. Census-linked demographic data from Bowling Green State University's National Center for Family and Marriage Research show that in 2024, 57% of adults with only a high school diploma and 53% of those with less than a high school diploma were currently unmarried, both near-record levels (the less-than-high-school group actually peaked slightly higher, around 58%, in the early 2010s). But these figures describe the share of adults who are unmarried at a given point in time, a category that includes people who have not yet married but will, plus divorced and widowed people, not a lifetime 'will never marry' rate. Longitudinal tracking of specific cohorts (such as 40-year-olds, an age by which most eventual marriages have occurred) has found that even among the least-educated adults, most have married at least once; roughly two-thirds of 40-year-olds with a high school diploma or less had married by their early 40s in recent years, meaning the never-married share was around one-third, not a majority. Yang's framing conflates a rising cross-sectional unmarried rate with a lifetime probability of marriage falling below 50%, which is not supported by the available cohort data. The underlying trend of declining and education-stratified marriage rates is real, but the specific 'less than 50%, first time ever' claim overstates what the data show.