Trends in Higher Education – Part 9
Gender imbalances in higher education.
In a previous essay we looked at how relatively poorly boys fared in their elementary and secondary school years compared to girls. And men are also increasingly not in college. Women have long surpassed men in obtaining bachelor’s degrees such that today 58 percent of bachelor’s degrees are obtained by women, and predictions are that women will reach 60 percent of college graduates in the near future. The chart below shows the trend over the last several decades.
A significantly higher percentage of women than men obtain all levels of college degrees.
As the Wall Street Journal reports:
At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline, the Journal analysis found. This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education. In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.
Degree figures by gender from the Class of 2016 are listed here, indicating women now have an uninterrupted 35-year record of earning the majority of bachelor’s degrees in the US that started back in 1982.
The imbalance among men and women in college can have big impacts in reducing future marriage prospects (and, in turn, reducing fertility rates), since women with college degrees tend to want to only date other men with college degrees. As described in the Boston Globe:
Think about the dating pool as a game of musical chairs … You start off with 40 women and 30 men — very similar to the ratio faced by your average 30-year-old college grad. “Once 20 of the women and 20 of the men get married, the ratio among the remaining singles becomes 20 to 10. A two-to-one ratio. Once 5 more couples pair off, it becomes 15 to 5. A three-to-one ratio. And this is why all of us know these incredible women in their 40s ... who can’t seem to meet a decent guy. It’s not because they suck at dating, which is what their mothers and married friends have been telling them for the last 15 years. This is a demographic problem.”
The gender imbalance phenomenon also extends to doctoral degrees. As Mark Perry reports, in 2020, “For the 12th year in a row, women earned a majority of doctoral degrees awarded at US universities in 2020. Of the 76,111 doctoral degrees awarded in 2020 (Table B.25), women earned 40,037 of those degrees and 53.1% of the total, compared to 35,368 degrees awarded to men who earned 46.9% of the total … For every 100 men earning a doctoral degree last year, there were more than 113 female graduates.”
Despite this, 12th graders’ belief that women are discriminated against in getting a college education has increased dramatically since 2012.
In the next essay in this series, we’ll look at trends in higher education among people grouped by race.
Links to all essays in this series: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10; Part 11; Part 12