College gender gap widens: 57% are women
By Mary Beth Marklein, USA TODAY
October 19, 2005
In May, the Minnesota Office of Higher Education posted the inevitable culmination of a trend: Last year for the first time, women earned more than half the degrees granted statewide in every category, be it associate, bachelor, master, doctoral or professional.
Cause for celebration — or for concern?
Before you answer, consider the perspective of Jim McCorkell, founder of Admission Possible, a St. Paul program to help low-income high school kids prepare for college. Last year, 30% of the students were boys. This fall, that has inched up to 34%, but only because "we actually did a little affirmative action," McCorkell says. "If we had a tie (between a male and a female applicant), we gave it to a boy."
As women march forward, more boys seem to be falling by the wayside, McCorkell says. Not only do national statistics forecast a continued decline in the percentage of males on college campuses, but the drops are seen in all races, income groups and fields of study, says policy analyst Thomas Mortenson, publisher of the influential Postsecondary Education Opportunity newsletter in Oskaloosa, Iowa. Since 1995, he has been tracking — and sounding the alarm about — the dwindling presence of men in colleges.
College administrators shy away from the term "affirmative action," a murky concept rooted in redressing historic inequities and loaded with legal implications. Yet the imbalances do trouble some admissions officials. (Related: Colleges remain cautious). So just as they might consider race or geographical diversity in building freshman classes, they similarly look for gender parity.
There are more men than women ages 18-24 in the USA — 15 million vs. 14.2 million, according to a Census Bureau estimate last year. But nationally, the male/female ratio on campus today is 43/57, a reversal from the late 1960s and well beyond the nearly even splits of the mid-1970s.
The trends have developed in plain view — not ignored exactly, but typically accompanied by some version of the question: Isn't this a sign of women's progress?
Today, though, the blue-collar jobs that once attracted male high school graduates are drying up. More boys are dropping out of high school and out of college. And as the gender gap widens, concern about the educational aspirations of young men appears to be gaining traction, albeit cautiously.
But even as evidence of a problem — a crisis, some say — mounts, "there's a complacency about this topic," McCorkell says.
There has been no outcry, for example, on the scale of a highly publicized 1992 report by the American Association of University Women, How Schools Short-Change Girls, which compiled reams of research on gender inequities.
That study "really ... got people to focus on girls ... (but) there is no big network that protects the needs of boys," says family therapist Michael Gurian, author of the just-published The Minds of Boys: Saving Our Sons from Falling Behind in School and Life, which argues that elementary and secondary schools aren't meeting the developmental needs of boys.
The minefields ahead:
And the needs of boys and girls are different, says Kimberly Tsaousis, a college-prep adviser who works mostly with low-income minorities at Cleveland High School in Seattle. "Girls are way more likely to just pay attention" during advising sessions, she says. "It's almost less cool" for boys to show interest in college.
Talk of gender is fraught with social, legal and political minefields. Witness the outcry after Harvard President Lawrence Summers remarked in January that women might be underrepresented in sciences because of innate differences in abilities. For one thing, female inequities persist.
There's still a pay gap. According to the Census Bureau, women on average earned 77 cents to each dollar paid to male counterparts in 2004.
So it's perhaps no surprise that most educators exploring the issue have an eye toward equilibrium.
Maine's Department of Education, for example, created a task force to look closely at boys' poor academic performance and found a ratio of 154 women for every 100 men in the state's colleges and universities in 2000, the greatest gap of any state. But the final report, to be released this fall, will recommend strategies to promote gender-equitable education.
"We very quickly decided ... we wanted to make sure we did not neglect" girls even while exploring obstacles facing boys, says deputy commissioner Patrick Phillips.
The University of Washington recently started a college-prep program for boys, but administrator Thomas J. Calhoun Jr. notes the university also supports girls-only programs, including one aimed at increasing women in engineering.
And though President Bush in his State of the Union address singled out boys when he unveiled a$150 million initiative, led by Laura Bush, to dissuade kids from joining gangs, a conference hosted by the first lady Oct. 27 is called "Helping America's Youth."
Federal laws pose additional challenges. Under No Child Left Behind, for example, schools must track data by race and gender, which helps educators pinpoint vulnerable populations.
Yet because of potential conflicts with federal laws created to ensure gender and racial equity, educators "can't target resources to where they see the need," says Deborah Wilds of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which finances college scholarships for underrepresented kids. "You know that the kids least likely to graduate are a particular gender or ethnic background, but then you have to walk a fine line in how you serve them."
Value in. .. equal numbers:
Most of those tracking the issue agree that getting males into the college pipeline is best addressed in elementary and secondary schools.
Even so, the disparities on campuses worry some admissions officials, particularly at liberal arts colleges where gaps are widest.
"We think there's value in having equal numbers," says Jim Bock, admissions dean at Pennsylvania's Swarthmore College. Last year, the school admitted more women than men, but it admitted a greater percentage of the male applicants than female. The student body's male/female breakdown is about 48/52.
In interviews, several college administrators, including Bock, said they would not admit a male over a better qualified female. But they do try to build a diverse class — an idea that echoes the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling on race-based affirmative action. That ruling struck down a University of Michigan formula that gave extra points to minorities because of their race. But the justices also ruled that schools could consider race as one of many factors because achieving diversity on college campuses is an important goal. In 2000, a federal judge told the University of Georgia to stop awarding bonus points to males (and minorities) in admissions.
A study this year of admissions processes at 13 liberal arts schools, most with a predominantly female applicant pool, found that gender was "not a significant determinant" in admissions decisions. When a gender preference for men emerged, it occurred at historically female campuses where the share of female applicants had reached 55% or more, authors Sandy Baum and Eban Goodstein say.
The authors neither advocate nor oppose affirmative action, but as men grow shorter in supply, "we should be talking about whether it's reasonable to give preferences to men," says Baum, a Skidmore College professor.
UCLA higher education professor Linda Sax says such a discussion should address what effect, if any, the gender composition of a college has on men and women. To find out, she examined data from more than 17,000 students at 204 four-year colleges.
Preliminary results show that on campuses that were predominantly female, both men and women got higher grades. Predominantly female campuses also led to a "significant increase" in men's commitment to promoting racial understanding and led males to more liberal views on abortion, homosexuality and other social issues, her research found.
"What we're talking about here is the impact of women's attitudes and values," Sax says.
For his part, author Gurian says one reason colleges may fail to attract more men is precisely because they are more geared to female learning styles and interests. Colleges that want to compete for the dwindling pool of men should emphasize male interests, such as sports, he says, and offer more male role models.
But meaningful change must take place well before the college years, says Gurian, who acknowledges a personal interest in the subject: He has two daughters. "We all know a boy that's struggling," he says. "If we create a generation of men who aren't getting an education, that's bad for women."
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Disappearing Act
By Michael Gurian
Washington Post
Sunday, December 4, 2005
In the 1990s, I taught for six years at a small liberal arts college in Spokane, Wash. In my third year, I started noticing something that was happening right in front of me. There were more young women in my classes than young men, and on average, they were getting better grades than the guys. Many of the young men stared blankly at me as I lectured.
They didn't take notes as well as the young women. They didn't seem to care as much about what I taught -- literature, writing and psychology. They were bright kids, but many of their faces said, "Sitting here, listening, staring at these words -- this is not really who I am."
That was a decade ago, but just last month, I spoke with an administrator at Howard University in the District. He told me that what I observed a decade ago has become one of the "biggest agenda items" at Howard.
"We are having trouble recruiting and retaining male students," he said. "We are at about a 2-to-1 ratio, women to men."
Howard is not alone. Colleges and universities across the country are grappling with the case of the mysteriously vanishing male. Where men once dominated, they now make up no more than 43 percent of students at American institutions of higher learning, according to 2003 statistics, and this downward trend shows every sign of continuing unabated. If we don't reverse it soon, we will gradually diminish the male identity, and thus the productivity and the mission, of the next generation of young men, and all the ones that follow.
The trend of females overtaking males in college was initially measured in 1978. Yet despite the well-documented disappearance of ever more young men from college campuses, we have yet to fully react to what has become a significant crisis. Largely, that is because of cultural perceptions about males and their societal role. Many times a week, a reporter or other media person will ask me: "Why should we care so much about boys when men still run everything?"
It's a fair and logical question, but what it really reflects is that our culture is still caught up in old industrial images. We still see thousands of men who succeed quite well in the professional world and in industry -- men who get elected president, who own software companies, who make six figures selling cars. We see the Bill Gates and John Roberts and George Bush -- and so we're not as concerned as we ought to be about the millions of young men who are floundering or lost.
But they're there: The young men who are working in the lowest-level (and most dangerous) jobs instead of going to college. Who are sitting in prison instead of going to college. Who are staying out of the long-term marriage pool because they have little to offer to young women. Who are remaining adolescents, wasting years of their lives playing video games for hours a day, until they're in their thirties, by which time the world has passed many of them by.
The old industrial promise -- "That guy will get a decent job no matter what" -- is just that, an old promise. So is the old promise that a man will be able to feed his family and find personal meaning by "following in his father's footsteps," which has vanished for millions of males who are not raised with fathers or substantial role models. The old promise that an old boys' network will always come through for "the guys" is likewise gone for many young men who have never seen and will never see such a network (though they may see a dangerous gang). Most frightening, the old promise that schools will take care of boys and educate them to succeed is also breaking down, as boys dominate the failure statistics in our schools, starting at the elementary level and continuing through high school.
Of course, not every male has to go to college to succeed, to be a good husband, to be a good and productive man. But a dismal future lies ahead for large numbers of boys in this generation who will not go to college. Statistics show that a young man who doesn't finish school or go to college in 2005 will likely earn less than half what a college graduate earns. He'll be three times more likely to be unemployed and more likely to be homeless. He'll be more likely to get divorced, more likely to engage in violence against women and more likely to engage in crime.
He'll be more likely to develop substance abuse problems and to be a greater burden on the economy, statistically, since men who don't attend college pay less in Social Security and other taxes, depend more on government welfare, are more likely to father children out of wedlock and are more likely not to pay child support.
Yet every decade the industrial classroom becomes more and more protective of the female learning style and harsher on the male, yielding statistics such as these:
The majority of National Merit scholarships, as well as college academic scholarships, go to girls and young women.
Boys and young men comprise the majority of high school dropouts, as high as 80 percent in many cities.
Boys and young men are 1 1/2 years behind girls and young women in reading ability (this gap does not even out in high school, as some have argued; a male reading/writing gap continues into college and the workplace).
The industrial classroom is one that some boys do fine in, many boys just "hang on" in, many boys fall behind in, many boys fail in, and many boys drop out of. The boys who do fine would probably do fine in any environment, and the boys who are hanging on and getting by will probably re-emerge later with some modicum of success, but the millions who fall behind and fail will generally become the statistics we saw earlier.
We still barely see the burdens our sons are carrying as we change from an industrial culture to a post-industrial one. We want them to shut up, calm down and become perfect intimate partners. It doesn't matter too much who boys and men are -- what matters is who we think they should be. When I think back to the kind of classroom I created for my college students, I feel regret for the males who dropped out. When I think back to my time working in the prison system, I feel a deep sadness for the present and future generations of boys whom we still have time to save.
And I do think we can save them. I get hundreds of e-mails and letters every week, from parents, teachers and others who are beginning to realize that we must do for our sons what we did for our daughters in the industrialized schooling system -- realize that boys are struggling and need help. These teachers and parents are part of a social movement -- a boys' movement that started, I think, about 10 years ago. It's a movement that gets noticed for brief moments by the media (when Columbine happened, when Laura Bush talked about boys) and then goes underground again. It's a movement very much powered by individual women -- mainly mothers of sons -- who say things to me like the e-mailers who wrote, "I don't know anyone who doesn't have a son struggling in school," or, "I thought having a boy would be like having a girl, but when my son was born, I had to rethink things."
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The New Gender Divide
At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust
By TAMAR LEWIN
New York Times
July 9, 2006
Nearing graduation, Rick Kohn is not putting much energy into his final courses.
"I take the path of least resistance," said Mr. Kohn, who works 25 hours a week to put himself through the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "This summer, I looked for the four easiest courses I could take that would let me graduate in August."
It is not that Mr. Kohn, 24, is indifferent to education. He is excited about economics and hopes to get his master's in the field. But the other classes, he said, just do not seem worth the effort.
"What's the difference between an A and a B?" he asks. "Either way, you go on to the next class."
He does not see his female classmates sharing that attitude. Women work harder in school, Mr. Kohn believes. "The girls care more about their G.P.A. and the way they look on paper," he said.
A quarter-century after women became the majority on college campuses, men are trailing women in more than just enrollment.
Department of Education statistics show that men, whatever their race or socioeconomic group, are less likely than women to get bachelor's degrees — and among those who do, fewer complete their degrees in four or five years. Men also get worse grades than women.
And in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialized more than their female classmates.
Small wonder, then, that at elite institutions like Harvard, small liberal arts colleges like Dickinson, huge public universities like the University of Wisconsin and U.C.L.A. and smaller ones like Florida Atlantic University, women are walking off with a disproportionate share of the honors degrees.
It is not that men are in a downward spiral: they are going to college in greater numbers and are more likely to graduate than two decades ago.
Still, men now make up only 42 percent of the nation's college students. And with sex discrimination fading and their job opportunities widening, women are coming on much stronger, often leapfrogging the men to the academic finish.
"The boys are about where they were 30 years ago, but the girls are just on a tear, doing much, much better," said Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington.
Take Jen Smyers, who has been a powerhouse in her three years at American University in Washington.
She has a dean's scholarship, has held four internships and three jobs in her time at American, made the dean's list almost every term and also led the campus women's initiative. And when the rest of her class graduates with bachelor's degrees next year, Ms. Smyers will be finishing her master's.
She says her intense motivation is not so unusual. "The women here are on fire," she said.
And when it gets to graduation, differences are evident too.
At Harvard, 55 percent of the women graduated with honors this spring, compared with barely half the men. And at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, a public university, women made up 64 percent of this year's graduates, but they got 75 percent of the honors degrees and 79 percent of the highest honors, summa cum laude.
Of course, nationwide, there are young men at the top of the class and fields like computer science, engineering and physics that are male dominated.
Professors interviewed on several campuses say that in their experience men seem to cluster in a disproportionate share at both ends of the spectrum — students who are the most brilliantly creative, and students who cannot keep up.
"My best male students are every bit as good as my best female students," said Wendy Moffat, a longtime English professor at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. "But the range among the guys is wider."
From the time they are young, boys are far more likely than girls to be suspended or expelled, or have a learning disability or emotional problem diagnosed. As teenagers, they are more likely to drop out of high school, commit suicide or be incarcerated. Such difficulties can have echoes even in college men.
Women in the Majority
What is beyond dispute is that the college landscape is changing. Women now make up 58 percent of those enrolled in two- and four-year colleges and are, over all, the majority in graduate schools and professional schools too.
Most institutions of higher learning, except engineering schools, now have a female edge, with many small liberal arts colleges and huge public universities alike hovering near the 60-40 ratio. Even Harvard, long a male bastion, has begun to tilt toward women.
"The class we just admitted will be 52 percent female," said William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions.
While Harvard accepts men and women in proportions roughly equal to their presence in the applicant pool, other elite universities do not. At Brown University, men made up not quite 40 percent of this year's applicants, but 47 percent of those admitted.
Women now outnumber men two to one at places like the State University of New York at New Paltz, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Baltimore City Community College. And they make up particularly large majorities among older students.
Thomas diPrete, a Columbia University sociology professor, has found that while boys whose parents had only a high school education used to be more likely to get a college education than their sisters, that has flipped.
Still, the gender gap has moved to the front burner in part because of interest from educated mothers worrying that their sons are adrift or disturbed that their girls are being passed over by admissions officers eager for boys, said Judith Kleinfeld, a University of Alaska professor who has created the Boys Project (boysproject.net), a coalition of researchers, educators and parents to address boys' troubles.
"I hate to be cynical, but when it was a problem of black or poor kids, nobody cared, but now that it's a problem of white sons of college-educated parents, it's moving very rapidly to the forefront," Dr. Kleinfeld said. "At most colleges, there is a sense that a lot of boys are missing in action."
Beyond the data points — graduation rates, enrollment rates, grades — there are subtle differences in the nature of men's and women's college experiences.
In dozens of interviews on three campuses — Dickinson College; American University; and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro — male and female students alike agreed that the slackers in their midst were mostly male, and that the fireballs were mostly female.
Almost all speculated that it had something to do with the women's movement.
"The roles have changed a lot," said Travis Rothway, a 23-year-old junior at American University, a private school where only 36 percent of last year's freshmen were male. "Men have always been the dominant figure, providing for the household, but now women have broken out of their domestic roles in society. I don't think guys' willingness to work and succeed has changed, it's more that the women have stepped up."
Ben Turner, who graduated from American this spring, said he did not believe that work habits were determined by gender — but acknowledged that he and his girlfriend fit the stereotypes.
"She does all her readings for classes, and I don't always," Mr. Turner said. "She's more organized than me, so if there's a paper due a week from Monday, she's already started, and I know I'll be doing it the weekend before. She studies more than I do because she doesn't like cramming and being stressed. She just has a better work ethic than I do."
Ms. Smyers, also at American, said she recently ended a relationship with another student, in part out of frustration over his playing video games four hours a day.
"He said he was thinking of trying to cut back to 15 hours a week," she said. "I said, 'Fifteen hours is what I spend on my internship, and I get paid $1,300 a month.' That's my litmus test now: I won't date anyone who plays video games. It means they're choosing to do something that wastes their time and sucks the life out of them."
Men are underrepresented when it comes to graduation and honors. Eighty-three percent of women who were Dickinson freshmen in 2001 graduated four years later, compared with 75 percent of the men. Dickinson women, who made up just over half of last year's graduates, got slightly more than two-thirds of the cum laude, magna and summa degrees.
Since the process of human development crosses all borders, it makes sense that Europe, too, now has more women than men heading to college. The disengagement of young men, though, takes different forms in different cultures. Japan, over the last decade, has seen the emergence of "hikikomori" — young men withdrawing to their rooms, eschewing social life for months or years on end.
At Dickinson, some professors and administrators have begun to notice a similar withdrawal among men who arrive on campus with deficient social skills. Each year, there are several who mostly stay in their rooms, talk to no one, play video games into the wee hours and miss classes until they withdraw or flunk out.
Of course, female behavior has its own extremes. In freshman women, educators worry about eating disorders and perfectionism.
But among the freshman men, the problems stem mostly from immaturity.
"There was so much freedom when I got here, compared to my very structured high school life, that I kept putting things off," said Greg Williams, who just finished his freshman year. "I wouldn't do much work and I played a lot of Halo. I didn't know how to wake up on time without a mom. I had laundry problems. I shrank all my clothes and had to buy new ones."
Whether the male disadvantage will persist even as women's academic achievement soars is an open question. But many young men believe that, once in the work world, they will prevail.
"I think men do better out in the world because they care more about the power, the status, the C.E.O. job," Mr. Kohn said.
"And maybe society holds men a little higher."
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Report: More women in college
Male dominance in class dwindles at colleges
Most Ohio institutions are included in trend
By Carol Biliczky
Beacon Journal staff writer
Any woman going to college for an ``MRS degree'' -- in other words, to find a husband -- may be sorely disappointed these days.
A report released Tuesday by the American Council on Education says far more women are going to college than men.
That is true just about everywhere in Ohio, including Kent State University, where 60 percent of the students are female, and at the University of Akron, where 54percent are.
``The situation has reversed itself over the last 25 years,'' said Bill Kraus, associate vice president of enrollment management at UA. ``Going to college has become more of an accepted practice for women.''
While the number of men and women earning bachelor's degrees is on the rise nationwide, women are doing so at a faster clip, said Jacqueline E. King, director of the ACE Center for Policy Analysis and author of the study.
Among white students in 2003-04, the year on which the study was based, the male population dropped to 46 percent, down from 49 percent in 1995-96; among Hispanic students, the male population dropped to 43 percent from 45 percent during the same time span.
Those gaps are due largely to enrollments of larger numbers of low-income white females and low- and middle-income Hispanic women, the report shows.
African-Americans still tend to have the largest gender gap, even though male college attendance rose from 37 percent to 40 percent.
And Asian-American males are losing their dominance in education, with Asian-American females now going to college at the same rate.
King, who wrote the report, said she didn't know why more women favor college, but it could be economics.
``Women who have a high school diploma really have a difficult time making a good wage,'' she said. ``Young men can find they can earn a good wage working on a construction site or driving a delivery truck.''
Those men don't necessarily change their minds and enroll in college later, the report suggests.
The older the male, the less likely he is to go college, according to the report. Men 25 and older represent only 15 percent of undergraduates nationwide.
That may be one reason that Stark State College's enrollment in North Canton is 40 percent male and 60 percent female. The rapidly growing state school concentrates on certificate and associate degree programs for both younger and older adults.
While Stark State offers everything from automotive technology to nursing, ``I think the emphasis has been on encouraging women to further their education in recent years,'' spokeswoman Irene Lewis-Motts said.
Despite the report, there is some local evidence that more males are going to college.
At private Mount Union College in Alliance, the ratio is 53 percent women and 47 percent men. But this fall's freshman class will have 387 men and 314 women -- possibly because the college won a Division III national football championship last year, spokeswoman Diane Thomas said.
And at private Hiram College, last year's enrollment tipped toward men and so will this fall's.
Jim Barrett, executive director of admissions, said he didn't know what sparked the change, as Hiram hasn't added a program that would be unusually attractive to men and admissions are blind when it comes to gender. ``It was an accident of fate,'' he said.
Does it matter to students when the ratio skews to one sex or the other?
It's evident on the dating scene and in class, possibly because men don't attend as rigorously, said Krista George, a Mount Union junior majoring in history.
Because guys don't want to settle down and have many women to pick from, ``a lot of my friends struggle with finding someone they like and that likes them,'' she said.
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Fewer men on campus
USA Today
July 12, 2006
A wistful line from Jan and Dean's classic Surf City song - "two girls for every boy" - has come true within the California State University system.
California commission recently looked at gender imbalances in the nation's largest higher education system and came away astonished. Most startling are the male dropout rates. The state university system's entering class in 2000 was 57% female, and the graduating class in 2005 was 66% female.
So what's happening to men on campus in California and elsewhere? The answer can't be the result of population differences: men make up 51.3% of the state's population between ages 18 and 34. Everyone has a theory: Parents blame toxic culture, teachers blame lax parents, and psychologists say boys are confused over shifting gender roles.
All are plausible, but the primary reason increasingly appears to be a relative lapse in boys' verbal skills. Not to worry, argues a recent report from the Washington think tank Education Sector that has generated considerable attention. This is not bad news about men, the report argues, but rather good news about women. The only gender problem on campuses involves minorities, it says.
It's true that black men lag the most. Three decades ago, black men and women were evenly represented in California's public university systems. By 2004, men had dropped to 36% of the black population enrolled.
But the education gender gaps transcend race and class. Among high school seniors who have at least one parent who graduated from college, 23% of the boys read at "below basic" levels on national tests, compared with only 7% of the girls. At many nearly all-white high schools, girls dominate the academic honors and run the prominent student activities.
On Tuesday, the American Council on Education reported that the biggest slide on campus has occurred among lower-income white males and Hispanic men. Among white students from all income backgrounds, the report found, gender gaps first emerged in the late 1990s and have widened each year since then.
Boys from higher-income families continue to go to college at high rates, mostly because there's a college for anyone whose checks don't bounce, even C-average boys. But too many of these boys end up in unchallenging courses or drop out because they were poorly prepared for college work.
College matters because workers with bachelor's degrees earn salaries that average 62% higher than full-time employees with only high school diplomas. More important, in a global economy a bachelor's degree just gets you to the starting gate.The blue-collar jobs that once supported families are drying up, affecting males more than females. So if a focused effort isn't made to address boys' needs, as was done successfully a generation ago for girls, many boys' futures will be grim, and the nation's ability to compete will slide.
Two girls for every boy sounded good to Jan and Dean, but it's not a healthy ratio for America's colleges and workplaces.
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Women gaining on men in advanced fields
By BEN FELLER, AP Education Writer
Thu Jun 1, 2006
WASHINGTON - Women now earn the majority of diplomas in fields men used to dominate — from biology to business — and have caught up in pursuit of law, medicine and other advanced degrees.
Federal statistics released Thursday show that in many ways, the gender gap among college students is widening. The story is largely one of progress for women, stagnation for men.
Women earn the majority of bachelor's degrees in business, biological sciences, social sciences and history. The same is true for traditional strongholds such as education and psychology.
In undergraduate and graduate disciplines where women trail men, they are gaining ground, earning larger numbers of degrees in math, physical sciences and agriculture.
"Women are going in directions that maybe their mothers or grandmothers never even thought about going," said Avis Jones-DeWeever, who oversees education policy for the Institute of Women's Policy Research.
"We're teaching girls that they need to be able to explore every opportunity that they are interested in. It's good to see that is happening," she said.
The findings were part of a 379-page report, "The Condition of Education," a yearly compilation of statistics that give a picture of academic trends.
Women now account for about half the enrollment in professional programs such as law, medicine and optometry. That is up from 22 percent a generation ago.
The number of women enrolled in undergraduate classes has grown more than twice as fast as it has for men. Women outnumber men on campus by at least 2 million, and the gap is growing.
In business, by far the most popular degree field among undergraduates, women earn slightly more than half of all bachelor degrees; it was one-third in 1980.
"You have a large number of women in the administrative work force, and in the past, they were never able to be the managers and the vice presidents," said Claire Van Ummersen of the American Council on Education. "Now they have those opportunities, and they are taking advantage of them. They can be something other than an administrative assistant."
The U.S. population is 51 percent female, the same as it was three decade ago. Yet legal and cultural barriers have fallen during that time, creating opportunities for women, experts say.
Women also have become savvy about boosting their income for themselves and their families by recognizing the value of advanced degrees, Jones-DeWeever said.
The enrollment of men in professional degree programs is declining.
"There's every reason to celebrate the success of women. And one has to be concerned about what's happening with men," said Russ Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education Sciences, a research arm of the Education Department.
"Women have been making educational progress, and the men are stuck," he said. "They haven't just fallen behind women. They have fallen behind changes in the job market."
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Women Surpass Men in Ph.D. Degrees
Women earned more doctorates than men at American universities in 2002, according to results recently released by the Survey of Earned Doctorates.
Original Article.
Stacy Waite, College Reporter
Badger Herald
2003 December 9
The percentage of males who earned doctorates in 2002 has dropped steadily since 1997 by nearly 15%. While women earned almost 51% of doctorates in 2002, the total number of awarded degrees is falling, the report found.
American students earned the lowest number of Ph.D.s in a decade last year at 39955, a decrease of 2% from the previous year and a 6% drop in the last 5 years.
But experts have differing opinions about the trends these statistics show.
Joan Burrelli, senior analyst at the National Science Foundation, said she felt the drop in males awarded doctorates led to the higher female doctorate percentage.
"There's been a drop in the white college age population," Burrelli said. "But the people who are doctorate recipients have been in school for seven to 10 years, so [the percentage of men earning Ph.D.s] is going up now."
Burrelli said although the numbers of men awarded doctorates decreased, not all male groups are on the decline.
"It's the predominantly white males that have dropped," she said. "For the most part, minority males [awarded doctorates] have continued to go up."
Nearly 19% of American doctorates were awarded to minority groups in 2002, the largest percentage in history; 40% of the doctorates awarded to African American students were in education, while 1/3 of all doctorates earned by Asian Americans was in life sciences.
Burrelli said NSF was still collecting data for 2003, but that the drop in men enrolled in graduate programs has leveled out, as opposed to decreases in the past decade.
Maresi Nerad, faculty at the University of Washington, director of The Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education and associate dean for research at University of Wisconsin graduate schools, believes the results showcase a different trend entirely.
"In actuality, numbers of women Ph.D.s have increased," Nerad said. "Federal agencies have been very good to increase participation in women to earn their doctorates."
CIRGE at the University of Washington conducts research on alumni careers and the effectiveness of graduate programs, both for other graduate schools and the employers of most U.S-trained Ph.D.s.
Nerad said although it is positive that an increasing number of women are earning doctorates, the real problem arises after the qualified women reach the job market.
"If women want to go on and stay in academia, there comes the trouble," she said. "Institutions have done a lot to increase women in doctorate work, but it stops there."
Nerad said that while 61% of all women Ph.D.s had a spouse with a Ph.D., J.D. or M.D. in 2002, only 21% of men have spouses who are highly educated.
"The combination of being a woman and having a partner that is also highly educated is tricky," she said. "Very few universities have dual spousal hiring, and it's very complicated to get both people stimulating jobs in the same town, and one partner has to make a sacrifice to stay together."
While women have earned the majority of doctorates awarded in education and humanities, Nerad said social and biological sciences were split evenly in 2002, and female engineering doctorates fell short of 20%.
"The number of successful women who have had Ph.D.s awarded are not medical," Nerad said. "But women earning doctorates in 2002 made an increase in all fields."
SED is sponsored by six federal agencies, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Education. Data is compiled by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and used to spot trends in Ph.D. recipients.
