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The Dating Market is Broken

Seventy years ago, most people did not sleep together before getting married, and most people eventually married. Men who were 9s out of 10 generally married women who were 9s; men who were 2s generally married women who were 2s. Most people found someone.

Then contraception became widely available, and casual sex became socially acceptable. There was an assumption that men and women wanted the same things from sex, but that assumption was mistaken. While many heterosexual men found sex with relatively unattractive strangers appealing, women tended to be much more selective about their partners. That pattern exists in many animal species, not just among humans. Women were also generally far less interested in sex without a substantial degree of romantic commitment.

Polls show that while men rate 50% of women as having below-average looks, women rate 80% of men as below average.

The most attractive men—whatever exactly that means—often discover that they cannot end relationships with female sexual partners without causing them a great deal of emotional pain. Ethical men respond by committing to one woman and leaving the sexual marketplace. Unethical men, whom I will refer to as “heartbreakers,” continue moving from woman to woman, indifferent to the suffering they cause.

When people meet through friends, heartbreakers may face serious social consequences. Online dating services, however, can be a heartbreaker’s paradise. A man can pursue women he would not even want his friends to see him with, much less women to whom he would commit. He can wine them, dine them, sleep with them, and then discard them with few consequences.

As a result, an average-looking woman—a 5 out of 10—may occasionally have flings with men who are 8s or 9s out of 10. She may wonder why none of them is willing to commit and allow the years to pass while waiting for an 8 or 9 who will marry her, unaware that this is guaranteed to never happen. In the meantime, her biological clock continues to run down.

At the same time, an average-looking man—a 5 out of 10—with the best of intentions may send message after message to women on dating services, pouring his heart out while receiving no replies.

Polls show that more than one-third of Gen Z adults have never been on a romantic date.

Women’s Marriage Rate, 1900–2018

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that young women are outperforming young men academically. Women receive about 60% of bachelor’s degrees, while men receive about 40%.

My own experience is that I've had much better luck meeting people at in-person events rather than through dating sites. That's how I met most of my girlfriends, and my wife. I've never had a girlfriend who lasted very long who I met on a dating site.

Many people are giving up. Some women have children outside marriage rather than settling for men who would be quite willing to marry them. Their children may then grow up with stepparents, who can sometimes present additional difficulties, or without the example of a healthy romantic relationship in the home. Many boys may also grow up without a consistent male role model. Meanwhile, many men become “red-pilled” and join misogynistic online communities.

The Universities are Broken

College has become far too expensive. Tuition and textbook prices have risen far faster than inflation. Many young people graduate with staggering amounts of debt that can take decades to repay, and student loans generally cannot be discharged through bankruptcy.

The government's response has largely been to guarantee student loans through programs associated with Sallie Mae and other lenders. Critics argue that this approach pours more money into the system without addressing the underlying causes of rising costs, leading to the predictable result of even higher tuition.

Until the 1970s, many children were "free-range kids," allowed to roam their neighborhoods unsupervised as long as they were home before dark.

In the 1980s, photographs of missing children began appearing on milk cartons. Most of those children had been taken by biological parents who had lost custody after divorce. Those parents generally loved and cared for their children, but many people assumed that all of the children on the cartons had been abducted by strangers, sexually assaulted, and murdered.

Parents across the country became terrified, believing child predators were lurking on every block. Child-rearing practices changed dramatically, with children being raised under constant adult supervision, and that approach has largely persisted ever since.

As a result, many 18-year-olds arrive at college with little experience resolving conflicts without adult intervention. Universities respond by hiring armies of administrators—people who are not teaching—to supervise student life. That is expensive.

Another problem is that the U.S. News & World Report college rankings do not directly measure how much students have learned. Some seniors take standardized tests such as the GRE, but only those planning to attend graduate school, so they are not a representative sample. As a result, colleges are evaluated largely on the basis of their research rather than the quality of their teaching, making it difficult for affordable teaching-focused colleges to receive the recognition they deserve.

Today there are many ways to learn independently, especially through the Internet. However, it remains difficult for people to demonstrate that learning in a way employers can easily evaluate. Employers can assess job-specific skills during interviews, but it is much harder to evaluate a candidate's general knowledge. One possible solution would be standardized examinations similar to the GRE, with scores made available to employers. However, because such tests would almost certainly produce different average scores across demographic groups—as the SAT and GRE do—their use could expose employers to discrimination lawsuits. The burden would be on the employer to demonstrate that test scores were relevant to job performance, a burden that is often difficult to satisfy. As a result, universities are effectively permitted to use standardized tests such as the SAT and GRE when evaluating applicants, while employers face much greater legal risk in doing so. This leaves universities with a near-monopoly on widely recognized academic credentials, while the cost of obtaining those credentials continues to rise.

There was a strong movement to persuade universities to stop requiring standardized tests for admission and to rely instead on grades, essays, and other criteria. Many schools adopted test-optional or test-blind admissions policies. Some universities later found that students with excellent high-school grades were nevertheless arriving with serious gaps in their mathematical preparation. In 2026, for example, more than a thousand University of California STEM professors urged the university to reinstate the SAT or ACT for STEM applicants, arguing that the absence of standardized testing had allowed some students with strong grades but only middle-school-level mathematics skills to be admitted to quantitatively demanding programs. Many elite universities have since restored standardized testing after concluding that grades alone do not provide enough information about academic preparation. Employers, however, still face much greater legal obstacles than universities when using standardized tests to evaluate job applicants.