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Do ladies love country boys? Not if they're undereducated

By Richard Whitmire

Aficionados of country music know the traditional themes, which start with unquestioning and enduring love for bird dogs, pickups and shotguns. There are battles with the bottle and broken hearts. Lots of them. But there's a new theme emerging: Ladies, especially those well-educated urban gals, love country boys. Take Trace Adkins' hit Ladies Love Country Boys. The video shows a flock of finely dressed, female professionals chasing a lone cowboy through a series of urban canyons:

"You can raise her up a lady

But there's one thing you just can't avoid

Ladies love country boys"

Or take Eric Church's Guys Like Me:

"You must have had your pick

Of all the trust fund types

But you came back to me"

It makes for nice lyrics, and it undoubtedly makes those country boys feel good about themselves as they shuck college. Unfortunately, in researching my book about gender and education, I found no evidence that women are willing to "marry down." Not only are the wannabe cowboys watching those videos unlikely to nab more successful women, if current trends in education continue, they also are less likely to find anyone to marry — or land decent work. Census data show a rising rate of men, especially the less educated, entering middle age without ever having married. The reason: Why marry a less educated man, ask women, who now earn 62% of associate's degrees and 57% of bachelor's degrees? "More working-class men are becoming disconnected from the institution of marriage," says Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. "This spells trouble for these men, their children and their communities."

In 2008, I surveyed Pennsylvania universities that cater to the sons and daughters of working-class families. At Bloomsburg University, for example, only 35% of the graduates were male.

A recent Northeastern University study tracked the 2007 graduates of Boston public schools and found that for every 166 females in four-year colleges, there were 100 males. Among white males, the college-going rate fell below that of black females.

In the U.S., little is known about this group because school accountability systems such as No Child Left Behind focus on minorities and ignore gender.

Something's going on here that warrants more investigation. We know that about 75% of the jobs lost in the ongoing Great Recession were held by men, many of them in the manufacturing sector. These jobs are not coming back.

And academic evidence of white boys from blue-collar families is not encouraging. It's a harbinger of the future, given that many police officers and machine shop operators need higher education credentials. Unfortunately, nobody's paying attention.

And it doesn't help when country singer Jake Owen turns out a video showing an L.A.-worthy fashion model gyrating into a bar in microskin leather panting to make out in the back of his pickup truck ... but saying: "Hey boy, do you mind taking me home tonight cuz I ain't never seen a country boy with tires on his truck this high."

I have news for the working-class males watching that shimmering babe: For better or worse, damn few sophisticated ladies are going to follow you home cuz of your big tires.