An Ohio State study found that divorce decreases wealth by an average of 77 percent.

Now consider the demographics of black college graduates. The overwhelming majority are women. Females now account for 66 percent of all bachelor’s degrees earned by blacks; 70 percent of master’s degrees; and 60 percent of doctorates. Women tend to desire husbands who are as educated or more educated than they are, which makes marriage more difficult for black women with higher-education degrees. According to an analysis by the Brookings Institution, the percentage of black female college graduates aged 25 to 35 who have never married is 60 percent, compared to 38 percent for white college-educated women.

Unsurprisingly, more black than white women marry men who have less education. The Brookings study found that only 49 percent of college-educated black women marry men with at least some post-secondary education, compared with 84 percent of college-educated white women. Since education is so closely tied to income, a household with two college graduates is overwhelmingly likely to make more income than a household with only one college graduate.

There are many additional reasons that stable married couples accumulate wealth. Family members are more likely to loan and donate money to a son-in-law, say, than to a live-in boyfriend.

The bruising reality for all Americans — though, like most things, it is starker among African-Americans — is that men are falling behind. The retreat from stable families that began in the 1960s and really hit the skids in the 1980s has now yielded adults who have been damaged.

There’s nothing wrong in principle with efforts to make college more affordable and to focus on racial discrimination, but the real source of the black/white wealth disparity probably owes more to the marriage gap than to those things. The Aspen Institute should focus on that.