10 Weird Outcomes Caused by more Women than Men Attending College
The college attendance gender gap has shifted and it is growing fast. For decades, twice as many men as women graduated with bachelor’s degrees. Women not only caught up to men in the 1980s, they started to statistically pass them by. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, thirty years later, more than half (57%) of college students are women. More women (one-third of those enrolled) are also completing their bachelor’s degrees than are men.
OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) members, including the US, have seen
the college enrollment and graduation gender gap reverse itself innearly all of their 34 participating democratic countries. OECD members meet, discuss, and determine social and economic policies applicable in free market economies. Using this data, they analyze why there are more women undergraduates than men.
By 2002, fifteen of the 17 OECD countries having consistent post-secondary higher-education (France, Portugal, Sweden, US, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Spain, and UK), reported that women outnumbered men. Only Turkey and Switzerland had OECD statistic ratio of male-to-female higher education enrollment greater than one, with a declining gender gap.
US college trends indicating women have caught up to, and surpassed, men are consistent with this global pattern of change. It has had a socio-economic impact on the nations where it is occurring. However, this trend may also be traced to socio-economic events, such as changes in employment and labor force, family structure and income, and globalization as well as political/education focus.
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