Interesting story from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on the college gender gaps in that state. (Photo, courtesy of the newspaper, of students at a community college that’s 63% female.) I’ll paste in the entire story below, but first offer these two observations:

1. Local educators offer the “girls are more mature than boys” explanation for why so many more girls than boys head off to college. And yet, as the story points out, these gender imbalances are relatively recent in Pa. Did boys suddenly become less mature, or girls suddenly more mature?

2. Pa. labor officials serve up the women-get-more-benefits-from-college theory for the college imbalances, which is conventional wisdom. Guys can earn $60,000 a year as bulldozer operators without going to college, whereas women need a degree for the professions they prefer. Problem is, this is a case where conventional wisdom works only on the anecdotal level.

The official data referees on this question are found at the U.S. Department of Education and College Board. Both scrutinize every piece of data about the impact of earning a degree and both agree: Men and women get exactly the same benefit from a degree. At one time that wasn’t the case; women truly did get a bigger boost, but changes in the economy disfavoring traditional male jobs altered that formula. Equally interesting: the current recession appears to be accelerating that trend, with more male than female jobs lost.

Enough editorializing. The story:

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New annual report on minorities in higher education from the American Council on Education brings unsettling news about a standstill in what has always been an ever rising trend in America of the newest generation emerging better educated than the previous generation. All that has stalled.

But there’s also this:

Percentage of People Aged 25-29 With At Least An Associate Degree, 2006, by Race and Gender

Group
Men
Women

White
36%
46%

Black
20%
28%

Latino
13%
20%

Asian American
63%
69%

American Indians
16%
20%

 Bottom line: “Women outperformed men in college enrollment rates for all races/ethnicities. Overall, 44% of 18- to 24-year-old women were enrolled in college in 2006, compared with 36% of men.”

As for graduation: “Most of the growth in the number of associate and bachelor’s degrees awarded was among women. From 1995 to 2005, women accounted for 64% of the growth in associate degrees, and 65% of the increase in bachelor’s degrees conferred.”\

Also interesting is the progress made in female administrators: Over that time period, female administrators rose from 44% to 51%. As of 2006, women accounted for 23% of all presidential posts.

As I said, this is the bible of data on this issue. Interesting material on graduate degrees — almost anything. The catch: You have to buy it from ACE.

My commentary running today on the back cover of the Chronicle of Higher Education takes an unvarnished look at what can happen to the campus social scene when the female/male imbalance passes 60% female. That’s the gender imbalance campus admissions officers fear most, the threshold where you can feel a palpable difference on campus. What this means to the campus social scene is guaranteed to make parents of college-bound girls cringe a bit

Moving past 60% at some point triggers what biologists refer to as the operational sex ratio, which in the animal kingdom refers to the changes in mating habits that occur when one sex outnumbers the other. Humans are not immune, including college campuses.

Fyi: By the year 2015, the average graduating class from four-year colleges will be 60%. Trying to maintain healthy relationships between the sexes is one reason so many college admissions officers quietly grant admissions preferences to men (not that they would call them preferences. Rather, they draw large, overlapping circles to explain an admission policy that, in the end, favors men and discriminates against women). See my previous Chronicle commentary on that subject.

To date, this blog has focused mostly on what I see as the drivers behind this trend, boys falling behind in elementary school, never making up the lost ground and going to college at lower rates than girls. Gradually, however, I see the posts shifting more to the social impact of an education gap in the adult world — the search for “marriageable mates.”

(For more on that issue, sift through the “social consequences” and “college years” categories in the right column.)