A report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics today says that young women have opened up a big lead over young men in education. By the October when they were 25 years old, 30 percent of women and just 22 percent of men had received a bachelor’s degree, the government announced.
Women’s schooling edge comes as no surprise to Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann, the co-authors of The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What it Means for American Schools. Despite its title, the book is as much about the under-performance of men as it is about the outperformance of women.
I sat down recently with DiPrete, who is a sociology professor at Columbia University. (Buchmann is a sociology professor at Ohio State University.)
Here are some of DiPrete’s key points:
— “Boys don’t understand that school is like sports. You can’t start playing the fall of your senior year in high school and expect to succeed.”
— “It takes years of training to perform well in college.”
— Unlike young women, many young men try to emulate their fathers or grandfathers, who succeeded in blue-collar jobs without college educations. But those jobs don’t exist anymore. “It’s the echo of an older generation.”
— “Girls get gratification day to day from doing well in school. We’re not as good at conveying the need for school to boys.”
— Schools don’t need “boy-specific” policies. Schools simply need to raise the quality of education for both boys and girls.
— Girls still lag in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, but less so in the highest-quality schools.
— Likewise, boys are closer to girls in academic performance in the schools with the strongest academics.
There’s a real cost to men’s undereducation. DiPrete and Buchmann cite statistics that men who don’t graduate from college have lower incomes, a higher likelihood of being unemployed, worse health, and worse marriage prospects.
The most poignant part is that the young men don’t see it coming. Gallup asked young men aged 18-29, “Looking ahead, how likely is it that you will ever be rich?” Fifty-eight percent of them said it was somewhat or very likely.
