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These negative male trends have been addressed by books like Boys Adrift by Leonard Sax or Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves. They have even caught the eye of major figures on the left like Melinda Gates, someone known for championing women’s issues, who is pledging $20 million to Reeves’ American Institute for Boys and Men to address this male malaise.

Public intellectuals like Reeves, Scott Galloway, and Jonathan Haidt have blamed the falling fortunes of young men on shifts in our economy, schools that don’t do a good job of serving our boys, or technology that distracts adolescent males from real life. But they have largely overlooked an even more fundamental factor in a boy’s life: whether or not he grew up in an intact, married home with his father.

This research brief remedies this gap by looking at young men’s likelihood of graduating college or ending up in prison or jail in terms of their family structure growing up. The most striking finding is that young men from non-intact families are more likely to land in prison or jail than they are to graduate from college, whereas young men raised by their mar ried fathers are significantly more likely to graduate from college than spend any time in prison/jail.