The gap is most pronounced at the community college level, where for every 100 men earning associate’s degrees, there are 151 women, according to a study by the Washington D.C.-based Business Roundtable. The width of the gap at low-cost community colleges is mainly due to the large enrollment of African-American, Hispanic and older women, according to an analysis by the American Council on Education.
According to U.S. Education Department projections, the women’s share of undergraduate enrollment at four-year schools will climb to 58 percent by 2011, up from 56 percent in 1999 and 53 percent in 1986.
Why the growing gap?
While the gap grows, so too have the number of reasons explaining why.
Much of the focus has been on a supposed decline in the academic achievement of males. Tom Mortensen, the policy analyst for Postsecondary Education Opportunity and a senior scholar for the Pell Institute of the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, has argued that the gap indicates a world that favors “ female” talents, such as networking and communication, over “ male” skills such as strength and motor skills.
Andrew Hacker, who teaches political science at Queens College and is the author of Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Men and Women, has pointed to, among other things, boys struggling more with all the sitting and listening that is part and parcel of a primary and secondary school education.
However, the American Council on Education analysis found that the college education gap is as much a phenomenon of race and class as gender, because the gap is limited largely to African-American, Hispanic and low-income white males.
For every 100 black men enrolled in college, there are 166 black women, according to a study released this spring by the Business Roundtable; among Hispanics, the ratio is 130 women enrolled for every 100 men, while among whites it’s 126 women per 100 men.
| Continue Matthew Daneman's Rochester Democrat & Chronicle article "Area colleges face gender gap"
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