University of Michigan (Flint) economist Mark Perry has a interesting post at his Carpe Diem blog about a new Bureau of Labor Statistics study that finds that far more women than men are now earning bachelor's degrees. Perry notes the the BLS study…
…includes data on educational attainment at ages 23, 24, and 25 by gender from a longitudinal survey of 9,000 young men and women who were born between 1980 and 1984. For each of the three ages reported (23, 24, and 25) there is a significant gender gap favoring women for college degrees, and for the youngest cohort of 23-year-olds the gender disparity is huge: there are 165 women in the sample who have graduated from college at age 23 for every 100 of their male peers. (his emphasis) Also, at each age group there are more women currently enrolled in college than men (e.g. at age 23, 17.3% of women are enrolled in college vs. 16.8% of men), so there is really no chance that the college-degree gender gap will close in the future.
See chart below:
Credit: Mark Perry
Just because men are increasingly feckless, that doesn't mean that there's any war being waged against them, right? On the other hand, Perry notes that the Obama White House created in 2009 a special panel to to encourage federal agencies to take "into account the needs of women and girls in the policies they draft, the programs they create, the legislation they support."
Last year the Pew Research Center issued a survey that found that American women are now more keen to climb the career ladder and bring down big salaries than the guys are:
Two-thirds (66%) of young women ages 18 to 34 rate career high on their list of life priorities, compared with 59% of young men. In 1997, 56% of young women and 58% of young men felt the same way.
Colleges have been enrolling lower percentages of males relative to females for a while now. The current ratio hovers around 60/40. So guys, even if you don't see how a college education will help you with your downsized career plans, given these new survey results you might want to consider enrolling as a way to acquire an MR degree.
Given these trends, the dating scene for guys who do go to college must be awesome.
*Hat tip to Carpe Diem commenter Bruce Hall for the headline.
