College-going gender gaps exposed in Boston
Interesting article in the Globe uncovers a 10-percentage point difference between the genders in who goes to college — not surprising given the lopsided high school graduation rate there: 73% of the girls graduate in four years, compared to 58% of the boys.
I especially appreciate the sophistication of the reporting. Globe reporter James Vanzis made the effort to point out that this is not necessarily a racial issue, which is contrary to what groups such as the AAUW insist. Black females, for example, go to college at a rate that is 5 percentage points higher than white males.
I’d love to give a true-or-false quiz on this issue to federal Education Department officials. I”m betting most would fail, which explains why the department has never engaged this issue.
The Globe article:
College entrance rates rise in Hub
Women are outpacing men by wide margin; Similar disparities found in smaller cities
By James Vaznis, Globe Staff | July 28, 2009
Boston public high school graduates are attending college at a record rate, according to a report being released today, but young women are far outpacing their male counterparts, raising concerns among education officials about a widening achievement gap.
Some 78 percent of the city’s 3,300 high school graduates in 2007 enrolled at two- and four-year colleges. The figure tops the district’s previous high of 77 percent in 2005 and represents a gain of about 9 percentage points over the class of 2000, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University, which prepared the report for the Boston Private Industry Council.
The increases are greater than the national average, the center’s director said.
Rising college attendance follows efforts by state policy makers and local schools to emphasize to students that success in key sectors of Massachusetts’ economy, including healthcare, financial services, and technology, require a more highly trained workforce.
Boston School Superintendent Carol Johnson said the report showed the system was making strides in preparing students for college. For example, it has embarked on a campaign called “Next Stop College” that stresses the importance of higher education to students and their parents as early as elementary school.
“Boston is a college town and our students are surrounded by higher-education institutions,” Johnson said. “They should see those as places they can go, not just places in their community.”
Yet it is the city’s young women who are responding in larger numbers, according to the study of 2007 graduates, the latest year for which figures are available. Female graduates had a college-attendance rate of 82 percent and were far more likely to go to a four-year institution than their male classmates. The overall college-going rate for young men trailed by about 10 percentage points.
The wide gap is largely an urban phenomenon, said Andrew Sum, director for the Center for Labor Market Studies, who also found similar gaps in the state’s smaller cities.
“You won’t find gaps that wide in the Lexingtons, Concords, Brooklines, and Westons,” said Sum, noting gaps at suburban high schools were small.
The gender gap in attending college reflects a long divide in overall academic achievement between boys and girls nationwide. Of particular concern are low high school graduation rates among boys.
In Boston, the four-year adjusted graduation rate for boys last year was about 58 percent compared with 73 percent for girls, according to state data. And boys are also less apt to win entry into one of the city’s three exam schools, where nearly all graduates go on to college.
The gender gap in Boston also crosses racial lines - adding a new dynamic in efforts to close achievement gaps. Black females, for instance, attend college at a rate about 5 percentage points higher than white males.
Boston public schools have been responding to the gender divide. Three years ago, dozens of elementary, middle, and high schools launched a program called the “10 Boys Club,” which offers extra tutoring and builds a support network among 10 academically struggling boys at each school.
The district also has been experimenting with single-gender classes, while Mayor Thomas M. Menino had legislation filed on Beacon Hill this year that, if approved, would allow the first single-gender schools in the state in more than three decades.
The single-gender movement is in response to research that indicates that some girls and boys do better academically when split apart, but some civil liberties group worry the practice could reinforce gender stereotypes and could lead to a major setback for female students, who waged legal battles in the 1960s and 1970s to secure equal opportunities.
Nationally, college-going rates have been increasing, although not as quickly as Boston schools, whose rates hover above national averages, Sum said.
But many Boston graduates, once arriving on college campuses, do not achieve their dream of a degree, dropping out because the courses are too tough or a lack of money for tuition.
A landmark study conducted by the Center for Labor Market Studies last year on the city’s high school classes of 2000 found that only about a third of those who enrolled in college had graduated seven years later. It prompted Menino to call for doubling the college-graduation rate of Boston’s high school alumni by ramping up the district’s academic rigor and paring students with nonprofit groups to provide more academic support while they are attending college.
“The more you increase your college enrollment rate, the greater the challenge is seeing all those children through college graduation,” said Neil Sullivan, executive director of the Boston Private Industry Council, a public-private partnership between the city’s schools and employer community. The council has been conducting the survey on high school graduates since the mid-1980s, when only about half the graduates enrolled in college.
Financial issues forced Jeff Massena, who graduated from Excel High School in South Boston two years ago, to transfer from Wentworth Institute of Technology to the considerably less expensive Bunker Hill Community College.
His new plan is to earn an associate’s degree in computer science and then get a job that offers tuition reimbursement so he can afford a bachelor’s degree.
“I didn’t want to get buried in debt,” said Massena, of Mattapan.
Melissa Brown, a 2007 graduate of Madison Park Technical Vocational High School, also is taking a two-step approach to college.
She is earning a post-secondary certificate as a surgical technician at Bunker Hill Community College and then she plans to get a degree in nursing. She said it was her mother who persuaded her to go to college.
“She told me to strive to be the best that I can be,” said Brown, 20, of Dorchester. “I’m not going to stop. I just love school.”
James Vaznis can be reached at jvaznis@globe.com.
© Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Tags: boston college gaps
July 28th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
Going to the end of the article, this emphasizes the ever increasing importance of Community Colleges. This was discussed in an earlier article that you put on the blog. As for the acknowledgement of the problems boys are having and the complaints that proposed single sex schools, even if they are better for some boys and girls, represent rollbacks from gender discrimination battles that girls won decades ago, it again shows the difficulties. It just goes to show again that, without the buy-in of the AAUW and groups like them, progress on the education problems of boys will be very difficult.