Kay Hymowitz notes that this year, 57% of all college grads will be women, which leads her to ponder. Here’s a question: when the time comes, will these women be willing to marry “down”?

It’s not entirely clear to me why Hymowitz asks this question, but I guess I get the gist of it. So, back when the typical woman had fewer years of college education than the typical man, and women had fewer and worse job opportunities, the typical marriage involved women marrying “up” educationally and socioeconomically. As women’s equality advanced, both altering the economic structure of the household and making it easier to pair off with an opposite-sex peer, it has become more common for like to marry like. And, now, more women than men are graduating college. It stands to reason that some of them are going to have to marry men who don’t graduate college.

Most smart women don’t want to get hitched to less smart men because they don’t want a lifetime with someone who doesn’t understand them, who doesn’t “get” their interests and enthusiasms, who thinks they’re “weird.”

Our grandparents’ marriages were largely about shared production, but contemporary marriage is largely about shared consumption. If your IQ is three standard deviations above the mean, then chances are so are your best friends’–including your romantic partner’s. We like people who are like us.

College quality may be a decent proxy for intelligence, but fellas who graduate from colleges, or who don’t graduate college at all, can nevertheless signal their mental mettle by, say, talking. It works.