“It’s striking how much the bottom has fallen out for middle Americans,” says Bradford Wilcox, author of the study and the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, which issued the report along with the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values. “There’s a clear connection between what’s happening here and the middle class’s capacity to realize the American dream.”…

“What’s troubling to me is the way in which these moderately educated Americans are drifting away from the college-educated middle class,” says Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University and author of “The Marriage Go-Round: the State of Marriage and the Family Today.”