The Condition of Education: Postsecondary Enrollment by Gender � The Quick and the Ed

The Condition of Education: Postsecondary Enrollment by Gender � The Quick and the Ed

The Condition of Education: Postsecondary Enrollment by Gender

by Chad Aldeman

This post is part of a series on the annual Condition of Education put out by the National Center for Education Statistics. See earlier posts on the dramatic increase in Master’s degrees awarded in education, the college wage premium, economic and racial segregation in our schools,student/teacher ratios, and enrollment in for-profit colleges.
It’s tempting to think of problems as having recent or discrete causes. So, under this logic, males aren’t going to college because they’re playing video games, or because Title IX reduced their interest in it somehow, or because males had decent career opportunities with only high school diplomas back in the olden days, whereas now they don’t. In yet another instance where steady trends are the boring-but-correct explanation, consider the chart below. It depicts total college enrollment by gender from 1970 to 2008, and wha