Where the Education Gender Gap is Leading America

As early as kindergarten, a gender gap in academic achievement is evident in American schools. Girls are excelling; boys are underachieving. The longer students are in school, the wider the gap becomes.

Boys’ academic performance relative to girls has been plummeting for decades. Boys are more likely than girls to earn poor grades, be held back a grade, have a learning disability, form a negative attitude toward school, get suspended or expelled, and drop out of school.

This is not news. You’ve most likely heard all of this before. What may be news, however, is how the growing education gender gap is beginning to impact—and will continue to impact—colleges, the workforce, the marriage rate, and the fatherlessness rate in America.

The Changing College Campus

U.S. college enrollment is higher than ever. This is great news for Americans.

Well, actually, it’s great news for women, who now outnumber men in college by 4 to 3. Forty years ago, the opposite was true: men outnumbered women in college by 4 to 3. The tipping point occurred in the late 1970s. The College of William and Mary could now be more accurately described as the College of Mary and Mary.

In absolute numbers, more men are attending college than ever before. However, the rate of increase among men has been one-sixth that of women over the past 20 years. The problem is not that more women are attending college; the problem is that men aren’t keeping pace with them.

The disparity is even greater among minorities. For example, African-American women outnumber African-American men in college by 2 to 1. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that minorities will be the majority in America by 2050. As minorities make up an increasing share of the citizenry, the college gender gap will grow even wider.

Not only are men less likely than women to go to college, they’re also less likely to graduate once there. And the ones who do graduate are less likely than their female cohorts to do it within four years. Tom Mortenson, senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, warned that if statistical trends were to continue at their current rate there would be no men graduating from college after 2067.

While college enrollment is growing, college graduation rates have remained stagnant, which means that more and more students are dropping out of college; mostly they’re men.

Forty years ago, 1 in 5 Americans in their mid-20s were college dropouts. Now it’s 1 in 3. That represents a lot of wasted potential.

It turns out that when the gender ratio on campus tips decidedly toward women, both men and women become less attracted to that campus. Men don’t want to enroll in what is perceived as a women’s college, and women want men around to date.

This is presenting a dilemma for college admissions officers because most of the applicants are women and the average female applicant has a higher G.P.A., participates in more extracurricular activities, and writes a better essay than the average male applicant. So admissions directors must decide to either admit less-qualified men or risk losing men and women who both desire a gender balance on campus. Increasingly, they are choosing the former.

Perhaps many men are dropping out of college because they can’t keep up with the diligent, accomplished women they’re competing against.

The Changing Workforce

Hillary Clinton came as close as one possibly could to becoming the Democratic nominee for president. Sarah Palin made history as the Republican Party’s first female candidate for vice president. Nancy Pelosi was recently elected as the first female speaker of the House. There are now more female senators, congresswomen, and female state legislators than ever before.

What’s going on? Are women beginning to take over America? Not really, but they are getting there.

Women are having a growing influence on the fields of law and government. They represent half of the law school students and one third of the lawyers. By 2050, they’re projected to represent 60 percent of the law school students.

These changes are not just happening in law and government. Women constitute half of the medical school students and one fourth of the physicians. They’re projected to constitute 70 percent of the medical school students and most of the physicians by 2050.

According to a U.S. Census Bureau report, women are starting businesses at twice the rate of men. They’re also rapidly rising into managerial and administrative positions.

In short, women are becoming richer and more powerful—and this is a good thing for America. Fueling this trend is the growing number of women earning college degrees.

More education pays off in a big way. Those with a bachelor’s degree earn, on average, nearly twice what those with just a high school diploma earn in a year and roughly $1 million more over a lifetime.

Among 25-to-29-year-olds, 33 percent of women have earned at least a bachelor’s degree compared with just 23 percent of men. This is the first generation of women to be more educated than their male counterparts.

This shift means that women will increasingly get the highly paid jobs while men will experience a drop in earnings. This is already happening. Men in their 30’s are the first generation to earn significantly less income than their fathers’ generation did at the same age.

As jobs that require little education—such as construction—increasingly shrink, more and more men will become unemployed. In the current economy, unemployment is higher and rising faster for men than for women.

I recently spoke with a teenager about the importance of a college education. He told me he could get a job without it. I explained that many blue-collar jobs are moving to low-wage countries. He said, “Not being a cop or fireman.” I replied, “But there are only a limited number of jobs for cops and firemen.” He responded, “No, crime is rising.” Apparently, he had thought this through. From his perspective, more men out of work meant more men committing crimes and starting fires.

Some may argue that it’s still a man’s world. After all, men still wield more power and earn more money than women. This is all true—for now. But a change is coming.

The reason why it’s still a man’s world is because previous generations of men earned more college degrees than previous generations of women. However, as women’s academic achievement soars, the male advantage will gradually end and the female advantage will begin.

The Changing Marriage Rate

Fewer and fewer Americans are getting married. Married couples now represent a minority of all American households. For the first time ever, most women are now living without a husband.

Driving this trend is the growing ratio of college-educated women to college-educated men. As the ratio continues to grow, there will be increasingly fewer college-educated women who will be able to find college-educated men to marry.

Many of these women are choosing not to marry at all rather than marry non-college-educated men who are likely to earn significantly less than they do.

At the same time, many non-college-educated men are not interested in marrying college-educated women. A study led by Columbia University economics professor Ray Fisman found that these men tend not to pursue women who they perceive as smarter than themselves.

Consequently, non-college-educated men are finding it increasingly more difficult to get married. Thirty years ago, only 6 percent of men in their early 40s without college degrees had never married. Now it’s 18 percent and still rising.

The problem is that there are fewer and fewer women without college degrees for them to marry. And even these women are striving to marry college-educated men with better financial prospects.

Also, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for a husband without a college degree to support a wife as blue-collar jobs move to low-wage countries.

This is not to say that college-educated women and non-college-educated men never get married. But these marriages tend not to last. Marriages are more likely to end in divorce when wives earn more than their husbands.

This is increasingly becoming a problem. Thirty years ago, wives earned more than their husbands in 16 percent of marriages. Now it’s 25 percent and continuing to rise. By 2050, nearly half of the married women will earn more than their husbands.

Wives who earn more than their husbands are still often saddled with most of the household chores and child-care responsibilities.

Being a full-time or even a part-time stay-at-home dad is not a role that men are actively stepping into. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are currently 5.6 million stay-at-home moms and only 143,000 stay-at-home dads.

The traditional marriage wherein the husband brings home the bacon and the wife fries it up in a pan is becoming less common. Even more uncommon is the marriage in which the wife brings home the bacon and the husband fries it up in the pan.

Very few husbands are making the choice to shoulder half or more of the household chores and child-care responsibilities—even if they are unemployed or only working part-time. When a wife is the family breadwinner and has to come home to more than her share of the chores, she often decides that she would be better off without a husband.

For better or for worse, the future is not bright for the institution of marriage.

The Changing Fatherlessness Rate

The rise in the number of single American women has given birth to another trend: the rise in single motherhood. The nonmarital birth rate rose sharply from 18 percent in 1980 to 39 percent in 2006. According the National Center for Health Statistics, this trend is not being fueled by teenage mothers, but rather by women in their 30s and 40s.

Women are increasingly choosing single motherhood because men, we hear, have nothing to offer. Books like Peggy Drexler’s Raising Boys Without Men: How Maverick Moms are Creating the Next Generation of Exceptional Men contribute to this growing perspective.

Do men have nothing to offer? The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services reports that children from fatherless homes are more likely to commit suicide, run away, have behavioral disorders, abuse alcohol, use drugs, commit rape, and end up in prison. This is true regardless of the mother’s age, race, or socioeconomic status.

Clearly, fathers matter and have much to offer their children. So do mothers. On average, children raised by both parents experience fewer problems than children raised by single mothers.

Our sons are seeing fewer and fewer male role models in their lives. At school, 91 percent of elementary teachers and 65 percent of secondary teachers are females. At home, more boys than ever are living without a father.

Some single mothers recruit males—uncles, grandfathers, friends—to serve as role models for their sons. While helpful, these men are no substitute for a father who has a vested interest in his son’s life.

The rise in fatherlessness is a vicious cycle: fatherless boys are twice as likely to drop out of school; they earn less money without a college education; women are increasingly becoming more educated than men and aren’t interested in marrying men who earn less money than they do; so the number of single women rises; they choose single motherhood; fatherlessness rises; the cycle starts all over again.

The National Center for Fathering conducted a poll that found that 72 percent of Americans think that fatherlessness is the most significant family or social problem facing our nation. America is the world’s leader in fatherless families.

America’s Future

In short, the education gender gap that starts in kindergarten is leading to a nation of undereducated men who are contributing less and less to the economy and the family structure. This will adversely impact our nation’s productivity, prosperity, and society.

It’s in the interest of women as well as men to turn this situation around. It’s already too late to make up for the generations of boys whose educational attainment did not live up to its potential. However, it’s not too late to help the current generation of boys.

They deserve better. So do their mothers and future wives.