The Increasing Gender Disparity in College Degree Attainment

The gender gap in American higher education has widened significantly, with men falling behind women in both college enrollment and completion rates. As of the early 2020s, women have outpaced men in earning bachelor's degrees for several decades, with the divide continuing to grow, often referred to as the "enrollment flip". In 2021, men received only 42% of bachelor's degrees, the lowest share on record, which is roughly equal to the 43% of degrees awarded to women in 1970 (source: https://aibm.org/research/male-college-enrollment-and-completion/).

Compared to their sisters, young men are struggling to graduate from high school, struggling to continue their educations into college, and finally graduate from college. In a word, males are failing in the educational system. They are failing compared to women, compared to the needs of a college educated workforce, and they are most certainly failing to achieve the potential of their own lives.

Over the last three decades, males have moved from superior numbers compared to females at most points in the educational system, to sharply inferior numbers. The story that results from this change could be told in either of two ways: either the success of women, or the failure of men. In reality it is both. Women have made simply stunning progress throughout the educational system over the last 30 years. Men have not.

Because we tend to focus on the under-represented groups in higher education, we focus here on the plight of males. By any reasonable measure, males are in very serious trouble in the nation's educational system. In a world of escalating demand for college educated workers, that need has been met almost entirely by women.

Men are stuck about where they were in a time-warp that leaves them oblivious to the growing educational needs of the labor market and the rich rewards for those who prepare through education to meet those needs.

While women (and most men) rejoice in the deserved educational success of women, their welfare is also impacted by the poor educational performance of males.

- Many college-educated women will not find college-educated men to marry. When the college-educated women are ready to form their families, too many will then discover the dearth of marriageable men when it is too late to do anything about it. Black women have known this for decades. Women in all other racial and ethnic groups are headed towards the same place.

- Women with fathers, brothers, husbands and sons who are struggling in their lives will share in those struggles. The satisfaction many women derive from the success of their own careers may be compromised by the troubled lives of the males whose lives they share.

- Ultimately, with males disengaging from their traditional family, economic and civic roles, society faces a challenge about what to do with these disengaged males. The only answer our society has offered so far is to put a rapidly growing share of adult men behind bars.

Here we update and extend our analysis of data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics on the gender distribution of the academic degrees awarded by American colleges and universities. These data were first collected in 2001. The most recent data have been collected and partially published for 2024.

The data on college graduates tell stories of accumulated educational success or failure that spans decades. College degrees are awarded at the end of the education pipeline. They reflect experiences in school, at home and in neighborhoods accumulated between pre-school and college graduation. The very different numbers of college graduates for men and women at the time of college graduation reflect the very different experiences in the lives and educations of boys and girls when they were growing up.

The real story in these data is not the gender differences in college degrees studied here. The underlying message is in the different stories of girls and boys. We do not tell that story here--although we have offered our suggestions in the past. This story is far beyond the scope of this modest research letter. All we can do in these few pages is look at the end products of the experiences of children growing up. And the end products are very different for males and females.

We ought to be asking why.

➤ The Data

In 2021–22, U.S. postsecondary institutions conferred 3.0 million undergraduate degrees, including 1.0 million associate’s and 2.0 million bachelor’s degrees. Business and health professions were the top fields for both, with women earning the majority of degrees. Total degrees conferred have generally increased over the decade, though recent trends show a slight decline in bachelor’s earners

Data on earned college degrees is available online at the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) website at:

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cta

In this analysis we have expanded our previous reports on the gender distribution of bachelor degree awards to include all collegiate degrees: associate, bachelors, masters, doctorate and professional.

➤ Trends

Women have significantly outpaced men in earning bachelor's degrees, holding 57.34% of all degrees in 2016 compared to 42.66% for men. This represents a 25.6% gender gap, with over 1.09 million women graduating versus 816,912 men in that year, highlighting a long-term shift where women have become the majority of degree recipients.

Key Data Points and Trends:

- Total Degrees: Women received roughly 134 degrees for every 100 earned by men.

- Gender Gap: A 25.6% gap existed in 2016, where American Enterprise Institute - AEI (source: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/table-of-the-day-bachelors-degrees-for-the-class-of-2016-by-field-and-gender-oh-and-the-overall-25-6-college-degree-gap-for-men/) reported that men earned 816,912 bachelor's degrees compared to 1,098,173 by women.

- Historical Context: This reflects a consistent trend over recent decades where women passed men in total degree attainment and continue to increase their share of higher education credentials

➤ Degree Levels

Men earn significantly fewer college degrees than women, with data showing women receiving roughly 57% of bachelor's degrees as of 2016, leaving the male share at approximately 42.66%. This indicates a substantial gender gap where roughly 134 women graduate for every 100 men.

Clearly, the gender shift in higher education is occurring at all levels of enrollment. The shift has occurred earliest at the associate degree level. The largest shift has occurred at the first professional degree level.

The gender shift from majority male to majority female has not yet occurred at the highest degree levels. But the trends are clear and it is only a matter of time before most professional and doctorate degrees are awarded to women also.

➤ Numbers of Degrees

In the 2021/22 academic year, approximately 2.02 million bachelor's degrees were awarded in the U.S. While overall undergraduate degree earners rose in 2023-24, bachelor's degree conferrals specifically have declined for three consecutive years.

Business, health professions, and social sciences remain the top fields, accounting for nearly 40% of all degrees (source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2025/04/10/undergrads-earned-more-certificates-fewer-aa--ba-degrees-last-year/).

Key Data on Bachelor's Degrees (2021–2024):

- Total Volume: Over 2 million bachelor's degrees were conferred in 2021-2022. Despite a rise in overall undergraduate credentials, 4-year bachelor’s degrees have seen a 1.3% drop recently.

- Top Majors: Business is the most popular, representing about 19% of all bachelor's degrees, followed by health professions (263,800) and social sciences/history (151,100).

- Demographics & Trends: Women continue to outpace men in overall higher education, with college-educated women significantly outnumbering men. However, a ~4:1 male-to-female ratio persists in fields like physics, engineering, and computer science.

- Future Outlook: The number of bachelor’s degree recipients is projected to increase to roughly 2.32 million by 2028 and 2.46 million by 2031/32.

- Workforce Impact: In 2023, the median annual salary for a bachelor’s degree holder was $86,460, with demand in fields like business and STEM growing

➤ Race/Ethnicity

Based on 2024 reports analyzing recent data, including from the American Council on Education, racial and ethnic disparities in higher education persist with varying bachelor's degree attainment levels, often showing lower attainment for males in certain groups compared to females. Generally, across most racial/ethnic groups, a lower proportion of males earn bachelor's degrees compared to their female counterparts (source: https://www.acenet.edu/Research-Insights/Pages/Race-and-Ethnicity-in-Higher-Education.aspx).

Key Data on Bachelor's Degree Attainment by Group (Total Population Data):

- Asian: Highest attainment, with 33.1% of adults holding a bachelor's degree.

- White: 26.1% of adults holding a bachelor's degree.

- Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander: 19.5% of adults holding a bachelor's degree.

- Black or African American: 17.3% of adults holding a bachelor's degree.

- Hispanic or Latino: 14.5% of adults holding a bachelor's degree

➤ Institutional Control

Women have outpaced men in earning U.S. bachelor's degrees since the mid-1980s, with the gap widening to women earning approximately 57% of all bachelor's degrees annually as of 2020.

Men's share of bachelor's degrees has declined from a majority in 1970 to 42% by 2021.

This systemic shift is driven by lower male enrollment and higher completion rates for women across nearly all racial and ethnic groups (source: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/11/18/us-women-are-outpacing-men-in-college-completion-including-in-every-major-racial-and-ethnic-group/).

Key Trends in the Gender Shift (Bachelor's Degrees):

- Decades-Long Shift: In 1970, men earned 57% of bachelor's degrees; by 2021, that number dropped to 42%. Women have outnumbered men among college graduates since 2015.

- Enrollment and Completion Gap: The gap is caused by both lower male enrollment and lower completion rates. In 2022, 66% of female high school graduates enrolled in college, compared to 57% of males. Women are 11 percentage points more likely to graduate from a 4-year institution within four years than men.

- Field of Study Disparities: While women earn more degrees overall, they remain underrepresented in engineering (roughly 25% of graduates) and overrepresented in fields like psychology, education, and health.

- Persistent Trends: The gender gap in college completion exists across all major racial and ethnic groups, with the largest disparities observed among Black and Hispanic students.

- Causes: Factors contributing to the gap include lower academic preparation for men, a lower sense of belonging for men on college campuses, and more men leaving for jobs or other opportunities.

Degree Attainment by Gender (25-34 Age Group):

- Women: 47% have a bachelor's degree.

- Men: 37% have a bachelor's degree.

Despite the overall shift towards women, men still make up the majority of graduates in high-salary, male-dominated fields like computer science (77% male).

Conversely, women's share of degrees has risen significantly in social sciences and business.

➤ Study Fields

A version of the gender shift has occurred in all major academic fields of study that have been dominated by males in the past.

Academic fields historically and consistently dominated by males include engineering, computer science, physics, mathematics, and economics. These STEM disciplines often maintain over 60–70% male representation, despite rising overall female enrollment in higher education. Other male-dominated fields include philosophy and, traditionally, business administration (source: https://econofact.org/are-women-reaching-parity-with-men-in-stem).

Key Male-Dominated Fields of Study:

- Engineering: Civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering are heavily male-dominated, with engineering fields being roughly 77.8% male.

- Computer Science & IT: Consistently maintains a high percentage of male students, often around 74.2%.

- Physical Sciences & Mathematics: Physics, mathematics, and geosciences have low female participation.

- Economics: A social science that remains male-dominated, unlike sociology or psychology.

- Philosophy: Consistently a majority-male field.

Contextual Details:

- Persistent Trends: Despite efforts to diversify, STEM fields remain heavily male-dominated.

- Shifting Fields: While biology was once male-dominated (71% in 1971), it has shifted to become majority-female.

- Impact: The imbalance in these fields is linked to higher-earning, male-dominated occupations, contributing to the gender pay gap.

Only in foreign languages/literature and visual/performing arts did the share of bachelor's degrees awarded to males increase.

In major fields like mathematics, social science/history, business, and biology/life sciences, men and women earn bachelor degrees in roughly equal numbers.

Interestingly, there are no traditionally female fields of study that have attracted a large numbers of males. All of the gender shifts by fields of study are the result of many more women entering traditional male fields, not the reverse.

➤ States

Our final unit of analysis of the redistribution of college degrees by gender is the state. Here we are talking geography.

Women hold a higher percentage of college degrees than men across all U.S. states, with the national average of women aged 25-44 with degrees at 37.8%.

Women comprise approximately 58% of bachelor's degree recipients. Massachusetts leads with 53.7% of women as college graduates, while West Virginia is lowest at 26.5% (source: https://educationdata.org/college-enrollment-statistics).

And the breadth of the phenomenon we have been describing becomes most apparent here.

- A majority of the associate's degrees were awarded to females in every one of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia.

- A majority of the bachelor's degrees were awarded to females in every state plus DC.

- A majority of the master's degrees were awarded to women in every state and DC.

Only at the level of the doctorate degree were more degrees awarded to men than women--except in five states.

In this respect these states may be viewed as experimental labs for the gender-redistribution revolution. The consequences, if any, for the redistribution in higher educational enrollment and degrees awarded should become apparent in these states before other lagging states are faced with the issues that may arise.

➤ Discussion

This analysis of data on the gender distribution of bachelor's degrees awarded in the United States has sought to make two main points.

First, the redistribution of bachelor's degrees from men to women has been underway for a very long time, at least 130 years. The period between 1940 and 1970 appears to have been an anomaly in this trend caused by World War II.

About 1970, the trend from the first four decades of the twentieth century merely resumed - it was not a new phenomenon.

This trend up to 1980 was an important correction that brought women into a parity relationship with men. Where men and women are about equally distributed in the population, the distribution of bachelor's degrees that represents the gender distribution in the college-age population was reached in 1980.

Since 1980 the redistribution of bachelor's degrees across the genders has continued, creating an imbalance in the opposite direction. No longer may the trend of the last two decades be called a correction. Women are earning - and we stress earning and deserving - the gains in bachelor's degree attainment achieved since 1980.

Second, the redistribution of bachelor's degrees from males to females has been very broadly based. This redistribution has occurred in all 50 states, in all racial/ethnic groups of the population, and in both public and private higher educational institutions. In all fields traditionally dominated by men, women have made substantial gains over the last 30 years. We think it is safe to say that there are no remaining male reserves in bachelor degree awards, although engineering and computer science seem to be struggling to hold on to their historic male dominance.

➤ Why?

The depth and breadth of the gender shift in bachelor's degree awards must certainly lead us to ask: Why? What is happening? We think we see some of the answers more clearly than we do others.

Labor market shifts. First, the United States has been moving swiftly into the human capital economy for the last three decades. The proportion of jobs in goods-producing industries--which are historically dominated by men by a three-to-one margin - has been shrinking since World War II. This shrinkage documents the demise of the high wage-low skill labor market.

What has displaced goods-producing industrial employment is private service-producing industries. These jobs have grown from less than 40 percent of U.S. employment during World War II to 64.6 percent of jobs in 2000. These are jobs now dominated by women.

What this industrial shift means is that those with postsecondary education or training (and more the better) are getting the better paying jobs available in the economy. The income differential between college educated men and high school educated men is much greater than it is for women. On average, a college-educated male can expect a positive, significant return on investment (ROI) for his education. Studies indicate that a bachelor's degree typically yields an annual rate of return around 9–10% for men. For every dollar spent on tuition, the lifetime earnings gain, calculated as a net present value, can reach or exceed $260,000 for men (source: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/research-summaries/education-earnings.html).

Men with bachelor's degrees earn roughly $655,000 to $900,000 more in median lifetime earnings compared to high school graduates. The median annual rate of return for a bachelor’s degree for men is approximately 9.06%. The return varies based on major (e.g., engineering/computer science offers the highest ROI) and institution type. While long-term gains are high, the initial, average ROI can be negative for the first decade. A 10%–12% return is higher than the historical average for investments in stocks (~7%) or bonds (~3%). These figures often assume the cost of a 4-year degree (tuition, fees, and sometimes living expenses) and compare it against the higher, steady income of a bachelor's degree holder.

Men just don't seem to be getting it. And women do seem to be getting it.

Urbanization. The population of the United States has been concentrating in urban places ever since the first Census in 1790. Urbanization obviously brings us closer together, where social networking and communications skills are at an advantage. Our activities also change as we urbanize, we no longer put a crop in the ground in the spring and later harvest the crop in the fall.

We find it difficult to believe that men and women are living on the same planet. Women are aggressively responding to the huge economic incentives of college education, and men are not. We ask why.

As we stated at the beginning of this analysis, looking only at the gender distribution of bachelor's degrees gives us only a glimpse of the iceberg. Bachelor's degrees are awarded after more than two decades of childhood experiences in school, at home and in neighborhoods. There are twenty some years into which we must probe for answers for the question Why?

For those willing to search beyond the meaningless palliatives of affirmative action for males in college admission and building up campus sports programs to attract more males, the solutions should be sought at the global scale of a changing world.

We are urbanizing, and we have shifted from a good-producing economy to a service-producing economy. The shift from a goods-producing to a service-producing economy, particularly in the U.S., marks a structural transition driven by automation, globalization, and increased productivity, where services like finance, healthcare, and technology now dominate economic output. Manufacturing jobs declined from 1/3 of employment in 1945 to 1 in 12 today, moving labor from factories to service-oriented, often white-collar, roles.

These two changes alone offer relative advantages to women that put men at a disadvantage unparalleled in history. Men are no longer needed to fight off the saber-toothed tiger at the mouth of the cave. Men are no longer needed to plant a crop in the spring and harvest it in the fall. Men are no longer needed to pour molten steel and operate heavy manufacturing equipment. And maybe we will not need men to fight wars anymore.

What we will need are well educated and trained workers, with superior teamwork and communications skills, able to read and carry out complex instructions. We need more people whose minds deal with information in a concurrent, multi-tasking process. These are minds of women, not men.

The ultimate question is: What is the future of the male gender? Men's past roles, based on their strength and aggressiveness, are no longer needed in the human capital economy. Men are not adapting - if indeed they can. It is not possible to send the men back to Mars and reserve Earth for the Venusians.

It is probably no coincidence that the prison population of the United States began its explosive growth about 1975.

We take this as one indication of our country's inability to effectively address the preparation of young men for responsible, productive, contributing social roles.

The social pathologies of this failure spread to the women and children who share the failed lives of these men.

Higher education has the resources to study the causes of the problem, from which effective remedies should logically follow. Unless and until we do this, the preceding data will continue to worsen for men, and ultimately for women as well.

Our welfare is not individual, it is common, and since we are all on this planet mixed together, as we were intended to be, the efforts to study and remedy must involve us all.

Megan Wilson is a teacher, life strategist, successful entrepreneur, inspirational keynote speaker and founder of https://Ebookschoice.com. Megan champions a radical rethink of our school systems; she calls on educators to teach both intuition and logic to cultivate creativity and create bold thinkers.