Since I am removed from this discussion by geography, and age, not to mention the fact that I have no young ones “in the parsha,” perhaps I can add something.
First, any serious problem usually has more than one cause. Looking for “the” cause only causes confusion. Each one sees the issue from his/her own perspective, so we get rhetoric rather than analysis. The “shidduch crisis” is no different.
Second, it’s not so useful to compare the US situation to that of Europe, because there are more differences than geography and hashkafah. “Europe” as we refer to it belongs to a past age, when babies died in droves and grown women died in childbirth. Diseases like tuberculosis also cut off lives. Poverty was real. People were more pragmatic about things like age because they had to be.
So, what about here and now? There are several reasons suggested, and most of them are right. One major reason is simply mathematical. 2+2=4 and 2-2=0. I’m comfortable with math and numbers and I can assure you that if you have equal numbers of boys and girls in each year, that if you remove the boys from three years worth of young people, that you will end up with three years’ worth of “extra” girls. Your “moving average” will asure that as boys get married and leave at one end of the pipleline and a new year’s worth enters, that if the pipleline for boys begins at age 21 and the girls’ at age 18, you are always going to have 3 years worth of girls “in excess.” This is objective. I’m not sure how to change it.
Another major cause of grief is the “pasul him/her out” mentality. “I only want the best.” This is usually said not by the boy but by the boy’s parents, but since they are doing the screening it’s their opinion that counts. So many girls who are – horrible to say – a size 12 or whose fourth cousin is off the derech, will be ruled out. Same if they went to the wrong seminary. Boys get posuled out because the went to the wrong yeshiva or – gasp – have been seen wearing a blue shirt. Forget it if the young person’s parents have been divorced, or someone in the family hs a “problem.” So the boys’ parents posul out half the girls, and the girls who are posuled out don’t want to take the “non-BMG non-future Gadol” boys.
And then of course we have the shadchanim making more problems of the same nature, and really creating a bottleneck that makes it all much, much worse.
And of course everyone has their idea of the “perfect” boy/girl, usually dictated by their fear of what the neighbors will think if they “settle.”
So what to do? As I mentioned above, the “math” aspect is beyond me. As someone else said, we should be discussing those aspects we can solve. Nevertheless, I think a major step forward would be eliminating shadchanim. Yep. ALL of them. It should be assur to take money for making a shidduch.
I know that that flies in the face of minhag, but the professionals are making the whole process a chillul HaShem. People who indulge in indiscriminate matchmaking because they would like the money or the kavod are almost as bad. Perhaps a central (computerized?) registry could be set up and lists could be generated and sent to the parents, in addition to free-lancing by “civilian” family and friends. At any rate, make shadchanus a matter of the mitzvah alone.
We also need to make it socially unacceptable to sit around gossiping about other people’s shidduchim. I don’t know how to accomplish that, either, since people take the idea of tachlis to the imaginable limits, but we can make a try.
I have some other suggestions, but this post is already too long, and most of them have already been put forward.