Is the Gender Gap in College Enrollment Influenced by Nonmarital Birth Rates and Father Absence

Researchers are trying to understand the increasing gender gap in higher education enrollment in the United States. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), males constituted just 43% of the postsecondary enrollment (Aud et al., 2013) and 43% of students graduating with 4-year degrees (National Center for Health Statistics, 2013). This trend is expected to continue in the near future, with college enrollment expected to grow 16% for women and only 8% for men from 2009 to 2020 (Hussar & Bailey, 2011). According to media reports, some colleges are making special efforts to recruit and retain male students (Lewin, 2006; Marklein, 2005). Although researchers have been exploring a wide range of social and economic factors that may contribute to the gender gap in higher education, thus far relatively few have examined how family structure may contribute.The current investigation was stimulated by the observation that the college enrollment gender gap in the United States began to emerge about 18 years after the beginning of major population shifts in family structure. In this article, we offer evidence that the increase in nonmarital birth rates and subsequent father absence may be a contributor to the growing gender gap in higher education. We gained this evidence this through two studies: the first with population-level data and the second with individual-level data.BackgroundAlthough men have historically outnumbered women in higher education within the United States, women gained parity in the late 1970s, an achievement consistent with other gains in the public realm. In the mid-1980s, however, the genders began to diverge at an escalating rate, with a consistent increase in enrollment for women and a relatively flatter rate of increase for men (see Figure 1). In recent years, the gender gap has grown wider and become more pervasive demographically. Using data from the American Council on Education, King (2006) found that the gender differential favoring women was present for all racial and socioeconomic groups, whereas in 1995-1996 it was not found among White students. In fall 2010, 45% of White undergraduates were male, in comparison to only 42% of Hispanic undergraduates and 37% of African American undergraduates (NCES, 2012).The causes and importance of men's relative underrepresentation in postsecondary education, a trend occurring in much of the industrialized world, are subject to debate in the media and among academics. Commentaries in popular books and media have ranged from armchair speculations, such as the idea that traditional education is not "boy friendly," to denial that there should be any concern about women's greater success in obtaining higher education credentials (see Jaschik, 2007, and Lewin, 2006). Research on the subject has had two major foci. The first is economic. For example, Dougherty (2005) argued that the differential gain in wages among women relative to men from higher levels of schooling would give women an extra incentive to pursue higher education. In the same vein, DiPrete and Buchmann (2006) found that it was not wages per se but a differential gain in women's chances of overall material well-being that was associated with a greater return on women's investment in higher education beginning in the 1980s.The second focus of research has been the individual differences in learning styles and behavior between boys and girls. Jacob (2002), using longitudinal data on a U.S. cohort of eighth-grade students in 1988 who were interviewed every 2 years through 1994 in the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (see https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/nels88/), found that the gap in higher education attendance could be explained in part by higher noncognitive skills among girls. Although boys and girls scored similarly on measures of cognitive ability, boys scored lower on factors such as attendance, behavior problems, missing a grade, and saying they dislike school. …