Education Experts on Gender Gap

Your first question relates to high school dropouts. AAUW's Where the Girls Are research does not specifically address student dropout rates and the reasons behind them, Currently, there is no standard way to calculate graduation rates, and with states using different graduation rate formulas, it is unclear how many students are truly graduating each year. AAUW recommends an accurate and standard method of calculating graduation rates that would provide a more complete picture of the high school dropout problem.

Your second question relates to college attendance rates by gender. In researching Where the Girls Are, we spent a great deal of time looking at such data, some of which is referenced in our report. Researchers point to a number of factors to account for women's increased college participation, including changing work and family expectations of young women, demand for college graduates in the labor market, and access to birth control. Furthermore, evidence also shows that the benefits of a college degree -increased personal earnings, improved family standard of living, and the probability of avoiding poverty - are higher for women than for men.

Where the Girls Are also makes an important distinction about the numbers of women and men attending college. Among undergraduates coming directly from high school, there is almost no gender gap. Statistics for fall 2006 college enrollment, for example, show attendance rates of 66 percent for young women and 65.5 percent for young men. At the undergraduate level, the higher numbers of women on campus can be attributed primarily to the disproportionate enrollment of older women students, who outnumber men by a ratio of almost 2 to 1.

My interpretation of the "boy crisis" is largely economic. In a sentence: The economic world is changing and boys are not getting the education they need to survive and thrive among these changes (and the girls are). Male identity is tied to the work men do. Men are at their best when they are working and getting paid. When they are not working they tend to become dangerous to themselves, to those around them, and to society. So keeping men productively engaged establishes the foundation on which they can assume family and civic responsibilities. This has to be the major educational goal: prepare boys for jobs as adults. There is certainly more to education than this, but unless boys are prepared for work nothing else is going to matter much.

The economy has been shedding male jobs for the last century. In the 1910 Census, one-third of all occupations were either farmer or farm laborer - today this is less than two percent of all jobs. During World War II, 35 percent of all jobs were in manufacturing and today it is about 10 percent. Manufacturing jobs will reach zero by around 2028. Mining, forestry and other traditional male occupations are headed in the same direction. These jobs did not require much formal education-high school was good enough for good pay.

But the economy is growing in private-sector, service-industrial employment. The big growth industries are health care and education, business and professional services, leisure and hospitality, financial and other services. The better-paying jobs in these industries require substantial amounts of postsecondary education and training. Without that, education the best paying jobs are not available to otherwise willing workers.

Males with high school educations or less have been in economic free-fall since the early 1970s. They face increasingly bleak futures of low wages, unemployment, no health care insurance, no retirement savings, no home ownership. And they make poor marriage partners and fathers. The girls get this - too many boys don't. Eventually, women will come to understand more than they do now that the success of males is important to their own welfare, too.

Because we have so successfully educated our girls, young women today are better educated than their mothers. And because we have so badly educated our boys, young men today are less well educated than their fathers.