The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights recently announced that it would investigate whether some colleges are discriminating against women in an effort to generate a more gender-diverse student population. Reaction was mixed, with some saying it’s about time that the “crisis with boys” in higher education is acknowledged and addressed, and others expressing some disbelief and ridicule that the gender wars have come to this.
But part of the overall response really stuck in my craw — the oft-repeated claim that we “just don’t know” what’s going on with boys. According to many, sources for the gender differential in higher education are a complete “mystery,” a puzzle, a whodunit that we may be intentionally ignoring.
Yes, there are numerous potential explanations for the underrepresentation of men in higher education — and in particular the growing female advantage in terms of bachelor’s degree completion. For example, it could be that boys and girls have differing amounts of the resources important for college success (e.g. levels of financial resources or parental education) or that the usual incentives for college-going (e.g. labor market returns) have differential effects by gender (why, laments the Wall Street Journal, don’t boys “get” the importance of attending college?). It’s also possible that changes in the labor force or marriage markets, gender discrimination, or societal expectations play a role — or that the reasons have to do with the growth of community colleges, changes in college affordability, or shifts in the available alternatives to college (e.g. the military).
Sure, this is a wide range of potential factors, not easy to untangle. But while a few years ago we really hadn’t a clue about what mattered or why (partly because the trendlines were just becoming visible) this simply isn’t true now. This is a topic getting plenty of attention in the research community, there’s a reasonable amount of solid data for analysts to use to tackle the major questions, and researchers are on it. Just as one example, I recently reviewed conference proposals for higher-education sessions at a national academic meeting, and more than half of the approximately 50 I reviewed were focused on the gender in higher education question.
I’ve learned the most in the past couple of years from a series of studies conducted by Claudia Buchmann and Thomas DiPrete. Buchmann and DiPrete are well-known for their very rigorous approach to hypothesis testing, and thorough (though often complex) approach to investigation. Their findings on this topic have been published in the top sociology and demography journals — places, admittedly, media commentators are unlikely to find them. So, to help shape a more informed debate on this topic, here are two key Buchmann and DiPrete findings which deserve a wider audience.
1. The growing female advantage in BA completion is much more about college success than it is about college access. While it is the case that there have been changes in college participation (with women’s participation growing more rapidly), the gender gap in BA attainment mostly stems from gender differences (among 4-year college goers) in who completes degrees. This suggests that whether or not boys “get” that they need to go to college has little relevance.
2. Women experience greater college success because they are academically better prepared to do so. Boys and girls score similarly on standardized tests, but girls excel in terms of course grades — and these grades are highly correlated with college outcomes. In fact, the gender gap in college completion is well predicted by middle-school grades. Moreover, girls exhibit greater effort (e.g. on homework) and other important non-cognitive characteristics.
So the gender differences we now see in higher education are largely reflective of already observed differences in K-12. Buchmann and DiPrete have tested for other explanations, including those described above, and they just don’t hold much water. The empirical story is thus pretty simple — now that the (mostly cultural) barriers to college entry for women have fallen away, we shouldn’t be surprised to see the issues we already know exist in K-12 having impacts on college outcomes.
Now, the search for explanations as to why there are gender differences in earlier schooling outcomes is the topic of a much more contested body of literature. Some argue that the problems lie in schools and that reforms (e.g. single sex schooling or the development of a more masculine culture in classrooms) should be targeted at schools. For their part, Buchmann and DiPrete think that the answers lie in some combination of school resources (the gender gap is smaller in highly-resourced schools), and a kind of culture re-orienting (driven by parental involvement) that can help more boys integrate attachment to schooling with the boy-culture desire to be emotionally detached. Girls exhibit stronger behavioral and social skills from the very start of kindergarten, and continue to exceed boys in the development of those skills throughout elementary school. Notably, the kinds of skills girls appear to have — more self-control, interpersonal skills, etc. — are the target of certain kinds of preschools and parenting strategies.
In the end, does research tell us definitively whether the appropriate policy response to a gender gap in BA completion is affirmative action for boys? Of course not. It’s pretty clear from these studies and others, including a new book from Thomas Espenshade and his colleagues, that any solution will need to address not only gender disparities but racial and class ones as well. The clearer implication of Buchmann and DiPrete’s work is that policy makers concerned with the lower rates of college completion among men need to focus not so much on the actions of colleges and universities, but on K-12 education and pre-adolescent experiences in particular. This is a pipeline issue, and is has been for a long time — for decades girls have outperformed boys in most aspects of K-12 schooling (despite a chillier climate there), and as the barriers to entry into postsecondary education have fallen away, they have entered and performed better there as well. Buchmann and DiPrete argue that instead of targeting interventions at boys per se, reformers could instead target groups of students from similar social strata who are underperforming in school. In theory, at least, it should be possible to develop interventions that help all students, but incur particular advantages for boys.
To sum up: the gender advantage in higher education is not surprising and it’s not a “mystery.” In fact, there are some clear directions for intervention. So, instead of lamenting a “whodunit,” let’s get to work.
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This particular post requires a long list of references rather than links, so here they are. Unpublished or forthcoming pieces (aside from the book) can be found on DiPrete’s Web site.
T. DiPrete and C. Buchmann. Advantage Women: The Growing Gender Gap in College Completion and What it Means for American Education. Manuscript in preparation for the Russell Sage Foundation.
A. McDaniel, T. DiPrete, and C. Buchmann. (Forthcoming). The Black Gender Gap in Educational Attainment: Historical Trends and Racial Comparisons. Demography.
J. Jennings and T. DiPrete. (Forthcoming). Teacher Effects on Social/Behavioral Skills in Early Elementary School. Sociology of Education.
J. Legewie and T. DiPrete. (2009). Family Determinants of the Changing Gender Gap in Educational Attainment: A Comparison of the U.S. and Germany. Schmoeller’s Jahrbuch.
C. Buchmann, T. DiPrete, and A. McDaniel. (2008). Gender Inequalities in Education. Annual Review of Sociology 34: 319-337.
T. DiPrete and C. Buchmann. (2006). Gender-Specific Trends in the Value of Education and the Emerging Gender Gap in College Completion. Demography 43 (1):1-24.
C. Buchmann and T. DiPrete. (2006). The Growing Female Advantage in College Completion: The Role of Parental Education, Family Structure, and Academic Achievement. American Sociological Review 71:515-541. (Note: This paper won a national award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Sociology of Education.)
J. Jennings and T. DiPrete. (No Date) “Social/Behavioral Skills and the Gender Gap in Early Educational Achievement.” Working paper.
21 Responses to The So-Called Boy Mystery
rbrunson56 - December 7, 2009 at 5:42 am
Here is one thought. Perhaps boys are tired of sitting in the classroom being lectured at, by the time they finish high school. Perhaps it’s possible that boys learn differently than girls. The challenge with embracing this thought is that it causes us to evaluate whether boys and girls really are different, which is currently very unPC.The other reason might be that by the time boys get to college, they really don’t want to compete with girls. They prefer to find women that complement, not compete with, them.
csgirl - December 7, 2009 at 6:18 am
The whole “learning style” argument doesn’t make much sense to me. Back when boys did better in school, and went to college at rates far higher than women, education was far more lecture-driven than it is today. My sons, who are in K12 schools now, are in classrooms that are far more active, and far more tolerant of kids moving about, than in my day. Sometimes I wonder if the whole drive to accomodate these supposed “learning styles” has made things worse for boys. Maybe boys need the structure and discipline of having to sit still and listen to a lecture.
philwinger - December 7, 2009 at 6:56 am
Boys who play video games (something approaching 100% of the gender) have the attention span of a gnat on crack. That means that the observations of rbrunson56 and csgirl are not mutually exclusive. Pedagogies of engagement benefit all learners.
mbelvadi - December 7, 2009 at 7:13 am
I don’t understand how the OP’s point 1 (that’s it’s about success, not access) could possibly be correct, in light of the stats we have all been seeing about how the ratio of females to males in undergrad programs is about 60/40 and applications as well as admissions are comparable to that ratio. In light of that data, how can anyone say that the attainment gap isn’t about who is getting in, in the first place?What I find most fascinating about this issue is how the liberal/conservative predelictions just completely flip compared with the issue of race in higher ed. Liberals suddenly oppose higher ed affirmative action and argue it should only be addressed at the “pipeline”. Conservatives are conspicuously NOT raising the possibility that females might be genetically smarter than males (where are Herrnstein and Murray?) as an explanation.
jffoster - December 7, 2009 at 7:35 am
I am not quite sure what the following means:”Buchmann and DiPrete think that the answers lie in some combination of school resources (the gender gap is smaller in highly-resourced schools), and a kind of culture re-orienting (driven by parental involvement) that can help more boys integrate attachment to schooling with the boy-culture desire to be emotionally detached. Girls exhibit stronger behavioral and social skills from the very start of kindergarten, and continue to exceed boys in the development of those skills throughout elementary school. Notably, the kinds of skills girls appear to have — more self-control, interpersonal skills, etc. — are the target of certain kinds of preschools and parenting strategies.”Does this mean that boys don’t have interpersonal skills when they without adult supervision resolve disputes in pickup football or baseball games on vacant lots? Does this mean we are supposed to reprogram boys to be girls?
goxewu - December 7, 2009 at 7:44 am
“The other reason might be that by the time boys get to college, they really don’t want to compete with girls. They prefer to find women that complement, not compete with, them.”How quaint. It sounds like something one of the three-martini guys in “Mad Men” might say. But maybe if this 60-40 split continues unabated for a while, the chauvinist worm may turn, and some female academic might be able to say that women prefer to find men who complement, rather than compete with, them. (And it is “women who complement,” not “women that complement,” isn’t it?)
stonecreek - December 7, 2009 at 8:22 am
I think csgirl is on to something. I have often wondered if the “child-centered” classroom so fashionable in elementary education these days is simply unsuited to most boys, who, in my experience, require the structure and clearly defined, explicit expectations that the teacher-centered environment provides, as well as more large motor activities in the form of non-classroom exercise. Ms. McGoldrick-Rab is right to look to the earlier years for the source of the current higher ed disparity, but given prevailing ideology in elementary education and the schools of ed that produce elementary teachers, addressing this problem will be a tall order.
rwhitmir - December 7, 2009 at 8:30 am
From my blog entry, whyboysfail.com:This commentary by University of Wisconsin professor Sara Goldrick-Rab properly moves the blame for the imbalances to the K-12 years but then falls short. What’s not happening in those years?Sara: Buy my book! I’m a veteran K-12 reporter and I have a few ideas about that. Why Boys Fail, with a great foreword by Washington DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, is available for purchase with an official release date of Jan. 13.(Oh, and by the way, it’s a little insulting when you lovingly document every publication by your fellow academics and yet refer to my commentary as “laments the Wall Street Journal,” as though that were a WSJ editorial. That’s factually inaccurate.)
cleverclogs - December 7, 2009 at 8:40 am
@jffoster #5 – I intepreted that section to mean that girls seem to excel at criteria that are deemed important. That begs questions, of course: why are those criteria deemed important? and are girls just “naturally gifted” when it comes to them or are they better at adjusting / more willing to adjust their behavior at certain stages of education?I don’t mean to give too much weight to a film but every time I turn around, “Idiocracy” seems to have encapsualted some burgeoning social ill and brought it to its absurd extreme. To wit: every time the Luke Wilson character says something that makes sense, one of our imbecile descendents says, “You talk like a fag.” I think there some kind of cultural truth there, some sort of association of “smart” with “effeminate” going on, more strongly these days than when I was kid.
jchslrc - December 7, 2009 at 9:09 am
So what becomes of all these young men who don’t immediately complete a college degree? Do they just delay until later? Are men without a college degree somehow making more money than women who do get a degree?
11191774 - December 7, 2009 at 9:28 am
There is a simple, elegant, and common sense explanation I’ve pointed many people to. It has to do with a different perspective: Different shapes to normal distributions.http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
slowlearner - December 7, 2009 at 1:02 pm
This seems like a subject that could benefit from comparative analysis. Do these sort of gender disparities appear in other countries, or are they phenomonen exclusive to the U.S.? How do other education systems compare to the U.S.? Without a more rigorous analysis, it seems that people will continue to throw out their pet theories with little in the way of evidence.
amnirov - December 7, 2009 at 1:03 pm
To redress this inequality, schools, colleges and universities have to return to acknowledging male-oriented learning styles. Orderly rows, the sage on the stage, rigid assignments, no group work. It’s probably time to put quota limits on female enrollment and give males some advantage in the application process.
librarians - December 7, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Has anyone looked at “success in college” and “success in the job market” across genders with the current generation? What’s the real impact of more women finishing college than men? Is there any?
jchslrc - December 7, 2009 at 4:12 pm
According to the 2008 U.S. Census median incomes for people 25-34 years old, men make more with an associate’s degree ($37,484) than women do with a bachelor’s degree ($37,006). Until this inequity is resolved, what’s the incentive for guys to go into debt for a bachelor’s degree when they could be out making money instead?
minnesotan - December 7, 2009 at 4:42 pm
“Boys who play video games (something approaching 100% of the gender) have the attention span of a gnat on crack. That means that the observations of rbrunson56 and csgirl are not mutually exclusive. Pedagogies of engagement benefit all learners.”This statement ignores most of the evidence. Cf. James Paul Gee, et al. I’m sure it was an ignorant stab at a theory the poster never bothered to investigate, but it seems important for me to dispute. Video games are not the problem. If anything, we should be wondering why video games have such a high and lasting appeal (the quoted respondant’s figure was about 100%, though this is clearly exaggerated) while college completion does not. What makes the video game more engaging than the college classroom, and what lessons can we take from that observation?
goldrick - December 7, 2009 at 10:13 pm
Hi,Thanks to all of you for engaging with my post. In response to some of these comments and questions, here’s a bit more info on two issues:1) How do B&D reach the conclusion that the growing female advantage stems more from college success than access?The analysis can be found in the 2006 paper published in the American Sociological Review. The authors took the total gender gap in BA completion (using the national longitudinal data from the NELS) and decomposed it into its composite parts– e.g. differences in college entry and differences in college completion given college entry. Their analysis revealed that changes in the rates of college entry among men and women accounted for only about 15% of the gap (with changes in entry to 2-year colleges amounting to 12% and changes in entry to 4-year colleges amounting to 3%). In contrast, the gender difference in completion rates among 4-year students– conditioning on college entry– explained 76% of the total gap. That approach (a decomposition that looks at the relative contribution of different explanations to the outcome of interest) is much more appropriate than the simple descriptive approach “uibranch” took in the comment section to address the question posed.At the same time, I’ll also note that in the forthcoming paper in Demography the authors do find that the contribution of disparate rates of college-going to the total gap in BA attainment is growing in importance over time. This means, again, that the relative importance is shifting– but differences in completion rates trump differences in access in terms of explanatory power.Also relevant– later this week I plan to blog on a new NBER paper by Bound, Lovenheim and Turner which shows that despite greater increases in college-going among women over the last 30-40 years, the decline in college completion rates has been almost entirely concentrated among men.2) How do B&D reach the conclusion that the persistent male advantage in terms of labor market returns isn’t a major contributor to men’s lower rates of success (e.g. via effects on motivation)?Admittedly, B&D took a somewhat different approach to this question by asking whether rising returns to higher education could be driving women’s increasing advantage– rather than asking whether persistent gender inequality in returns could be suppressing men’s absolute level of college performance. In the 2006 article in Demography, they conducted a trend analysis of the value of higher education for returns to higher education, measured against the baseline value of a high school education using Current Population Survey data over a 39-year period. While the labor market returns to a college education rose for women over that period, men’s returns rose even faster (and this is echoed by work of other researchers including U. Penn professor Laura Perna). They also note that in order to account for changes in men’s college performance, the change in the value of college to men would have to rapidly become a very important basis for educational decisions–and this seems quite unlikely. Now, understanding all of this demands that you keep your eye on the main goal here– to explain the shift in relative performance of men and women in college over time, not the absolute levels at any one point in time. I think some of the comments reflect difficulty in focusing on that key point. Understandable, but important when you’re trying to assess the authors’ arguments.
raymond_j_ritchie - December 7, 2009 at 11:02 pm
As a low-status-male and career NERD I find it amusing to hear successful middleclass career women telling me that they are worried about their son’s education. They complain their son is not being properly encouraged academically in school by teachers, particularly in Co-ed schools. Young males are getting the very heavy message that males are not expected to be intelligent or reflective anymore. Education is now girly-stuff. They are being lied to. Even more amusingly you hear young educated women complaining they cannot find partners with a decent education.
drj50 - December 8, 2009 at 11:53 am
At my mid-sized less-selective public university:* Males comprise 42% of the entering cohort (first-time, full-time, bachelor’s-seeking students). * The second-year persistence rate for males is 6% lower than for females.* The six-year graduation rate for males is over 8% lower than for females (five-year average).Looks to me like access and success.
dank48 - December 8, 2009 at 2:10 pm
For the last few thousand years at least, each new generation has to work like hell to come up with a way of alienating their parents. I didn’t spend my college years playing video games and all that, simply because video games and all that didn’t exist.Among the things the younger generation does is come up with yet another way to be inscrutable to their parents. Has everyone here forgotten what it was like to be eighteen? Has everyone here forgotten just how deeply they cared what their parents thought they should be doing? Apparently.Among the failings of my generation (IU 1970) is our self-centeredness. Having long-since survived the ’60s, which were not exactly noted for scholastic achievement by undergrads if memory serves, we’ve turned around and damned if we aren’t trying to “understand” the rising generation. Remember the “generation gap”? It hasn’t gone away; it’s just that we’ve somehow crossed over to the other side, and we’re not sure how we got here.Simplistic, superficial envy of the young is understandable, up to a point. But, having realized that we can’t get there from here, we could at least get out of their face about it. We weren’t fond of being told what we should do. We shouldn’t be terribly startled to learn that our children and, in some cases, grandchildren really don’t care two hoots what we think they should be doing. Why don’t we leave them alone, since they “pay no praise or wages” for our well-meant interference.Btw, anyone over thirty who is perfectly content to let their parents decide when and where and with whom they can have sex and what they may ingest is welcome to disagree.
11301218 - December 10, 2009 at 11:59 am
I did my college and graduate school in the 60′s. There was no problem in encouraging male participation in higher education. We had the draft. There were no male students on academic probation or suspension or taking 6 years to drift through college. The advantage of the draft was to focus male attention on long term goals. The incentives and disincentives were clear — get to be 26 years old and not go to Viet Nam. As soon as the lottery was put into place and then the all volunteer army, male long term planning vanished. Now long term planning among my male students is making next month’s pickup truck and insurance payment.