71401-Buchman · 2017. 12. 22. · In the United States, women currently far out- number men among...

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2006 71: 515American Sociological ReviewClaudia Buchmann and Thomas A. DiPrete

Background and Academic AchievementThe Growing Female Advantage in College Completion: The Role of Family

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In the United States, women currently far out-

number men among new college graduates.

Trend statistics reflect a striking reversal of a

gender gap in higher education that once favoredmales. In 1960, 65 percent of all bachelordegrees were awarded to men (Figure 1).1

Women continued to lag behind men in col-lege graduation rates during the 1960s and1970s, until 1982, when they reached paritywith men. From 1982 onward, the percentage ofbachelor’s degrees awarded to women continuedto climb such that by 2004 women received 58

The GGrowing FFemale AAdvantage in CCollege CCompletion: TThe RRole oof FFamilyBackground aand AAcademic AAchievement

Claudia Buchmann Thomas A. DiPreteOhio State University Columbia University

In a few short decades, the gender gap in college completion has reversed from favoring

men to favoring women. This study, which is the first to assess broadly the causes of the

growing female advantage in college completion, considers the impact of family

resources as well as gender differences in academic performance and in the pathways to

college completion on the rising gender gap. Analyses of General Social Survey data

indicate that the female-favorable trend in college completion emerged unevenly by

family status of origin to the disadvantage of sons in families with a low-educated or

absent father. Additional analyses of National Educational Longitudinal Survey (NELS)

data indicate that women’s superior academic performance plays a large role in

producing the gender gap in college completion, but that this effect remains latent until

after the transition to college. For NELS cohorts, who were born in the mid-1970s, the

female advantage in college completion remains largest in families with a low-educated

or absent father, but currently extends to all family types. In conjunction with women’s

growing incentives to attain higher education, gender differences in resources related to

family background and academic performance largely explain the growing female

advantage in college completion.

AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW, 22006, VVOL. 771 ((August:515–541)

Direct correspondence to Claudia Buchmann,Department of Sociology, 391 Bricker Hall, 190 N.Oval Mall, Columbus, OH 43210 ([email protected]), or Thomas A. DiPrete, Department ofSociology, Columbia University, 415 Fayerweather,Mail Code 2551, 1180 Amsterdam Avenue, NewYork, NY 10027 ([email protected]). The authorsare listed in alphabetical order. Earlier versions of thisarticle were presented at New York University inSeptember, 2004, and at Indiana University inFebruary, 2006. The authors thank Richard Arum,Dalton Conley, Michael Hout, Karl Alexander, andthree anonymous ASR reviewers for valuable com-ments; and Jerry A. Jacobs for his help and insight.The Center for Child and Family Policy at DukeUniversity supported this research. The authors ana-lyzed the restricted NELS-88 data under terms of alicense between DiPrete and the National Center forEducation Statistics (NCES).

1 Female college completion rates in the 1960swere lower than at other times in history. Goldin(1995) found that women’s college enrollment ratesexceeded 90 percent of men’s rates between the 1890sand the 1920s, although, as Jacobs (1996) notes,Goldin’s estimates were likely inflated because lessrigorous “normal schools” were included in these fig-ures. That female graduates from elite backgroundswere more likely during this early period (Jacobs1996) is consistent with the notion discussed later inthe article that high status families had more egali-tarian views about education for sons and daugh-ters.



percent of all bachelor’s degrees (U.S.Department of Education 2004).2 The U.S.Department of Education predicts that the “new”gender gap in college completion will contin-ue to widen over the next decade.

The pervasive nature of the gender gap rever-sal from a favoring of males to a favoring offemales makes it all the more striking. Thefemale advantage in college completion existsacross all racial and ethnic groups in the UnitedStates, and it is found in most industrializedsocieties. In the United States, women current-ly earn 67 percent of all bachelor’s degreesawarded to blacks.3 The figures are 61 percent

for Hispanics, 61 percent for Native Americans,54 percent for Asians, and 57 percent for Whites(U.S. Department of Education 2004, Table263). Beyond the United States, higher pro-portions of females than males currently attaintertiary education in most European countriesas well as in Australia, Canada, and NewZealand (Eurostat 2002; Organization forEconomic Cooperation and Development[OECD] 2004). The 30 member nations of theOECD nearly all show a growing gender gapthat favors women. The once prevalent maleadvantage in college completion has disap-peared in all but four countries.4

The rising female advantage in college com-pletion is an important topic of study in its ownright as a rare example of a reversal of a oncepersistent pattern of stratification, and alsobecause of its potential impacts on labor mar-kets, marriage markets, family formation, andother arenas. Shifting educational attainment

516—–AMERICAN SSOCIOLOGICAL RREVIEW

Figure 1. Bachelor’s Degrees Awarded to Men and Women in the United States, 1959–2004Source: U.S. Department of Education. 2004. Digest of Education Statistics, Table 247.

2 Women also are more likely to enroll in gradu-ate school. In 2003, women earned 59 percent of allmaster’s degrees, but they earned slightly less thanhalf of all first professional degrees (48 percent) anddoctoral degrees (47 percent) (U.S. Department ofEducation 2004, Table 247).

3 It appears that the especially large gender gap forblacks does not constitute a reversal, but rather acontinuation of a long female-favorable trend. Asearly as 1954, when the great majority of black col-lege students were enrolled in historically black col-leges and universities (HCBUs), women comprised58 percent of the students enrolled in HBCUs. Whenthe Census Bureau began tracking bachelor’s degrees

by race and gender in 1974, women earned 57 per-cent of all degrees awarded to blacks (Cross 1999:7).

4 Among 25- to 34-year-olds, a male advantage intertiary attainment of several percentage points per-sists in Switzerland, Turkey, Japan, and Korea (OECD2004, Table A3.4c).



rates for men and women could affect gendergaps in wages, labor force participation, and ahost of other labor market outcomes (Bernhardt,Morris, and Handcock 1995). The rising pro-portion of college-educated women relative tomen could alter trends in educational assorta-tive mating, as more women marry down, delaymarriage, or forego marriage altogether (Lewisand Oppenheimer 2000). These changes, inturn, may have an impact on family formationand parenting (Bianchi and Casper 2000). Inaddition to these broad social implications, thegender gap is causing concern among collegeadministrators, who worry that the genderimbalance is detrimental to campus diversity(Gose 1997; Thompson 2003), and amongadmissions officers, who are considering affir-mative action for male applicants (Greene andGreene 2004). Clearly, understanding the caus-es and consequences of the growing femaleadvantage in college completion is an importanttask for social scientists.

Despite its importance, virtually no researchhas investigated this issue. A decade ago, Jacobs(1996:156) noted that the literature on genderinequalities in education “often treats all aspectsof education as disadvantaging women.” Thistendency remains true today. Most researchaddresses aspects of education in which womentrail men, such as gender segregation in majors(Charles and Bradley 2002; Jacobs 1995; Turnerand Bowen 1999), women’s underrepresentationat top-tier institutions (Jacobs 1999), and theirunder-representation in science and engineering(Fox 2001; Long 2001; Xie and Shauman 2003).The paucity of research in one very importantrealm where women are outpacing men, name-ly college completion, constitutes a major gapin the literature. Following Jacobs (1996), weargue that failure to analyze the ways in whichwomen are advantaged in education (as well asthose in which they continue to trail men) leadsto a skewed and incomplete understanding ofgender stratification in education.

In this article we ask: “Why have womencaught up to and then outpaced men in collegecompletion?” The few studies on the femaleadvantage in higher education to date focuseither on a single explanation that can be onlypart of the answer (e.g., higher noncognitiveskills among women [Jacob 2002]; more rapidlyrising returns to higher education for women[DiPrete and Buchmann 2006]) or on a very spe-

cific subpopulation (e.g., low-income second-generation immigrants in New York City [Lopez2003]). In contrast, this is the first study toassess broadly the causes of the growing femaleadvantage in college completion with national-ly representative data for the United States.Additionally, it pays careful attention to how thefemale-favorable trend varies for different socialorigin and racial groups.

In a recent paper (DiPrete and Buchmann2006), we show that the value of college com-pletion in terms of its combined impact on labormarket earnings, marriage, household standardof living, and insurance against income depri-vation has risen faster for women than for menin recent decades. We acknowledge, however,that rising incentives for pursuing higher edu-cation can be only part of the reason for women’sgrowing rates of college completion. Resourcesare a crucial determinant of an individual’s abil-ity to respond to incentives, and inequalities inresources are a major determinant of inequali-ties in educational attainment. A large body ofsociological research, much of it in the statusattainment tradition, demonstrates the impor-tance of parental education and other family-related resources to an individual’s educationalattainment (Blau and Duncan 1967; Jencks1972; Sewell, Haller, and Portes 1969).Resources related to family background exerttheir influence at each level of educationalattainment, partly through academic perform-ance and partly through educational transitions,given performance. Although sons and daugh-ters share the same household, historically, theyhave not had equal access to parental resources.Recent major cultural changes, especiallydeclines in sex-role stereotyping and genderdiscrimination, have led to changes in parents’investments in children that constitute a shift infamily resources toward girls (Behrman, Pollak,and Taubman 1986; Hauser and Kuo 1997;Jacobs 1996). Importantly, however, there aregood reasons to believe that this process has notoccurred uniformly across all types of fami-lies.

Thus, the goal of this study is to elucidate therole of resources, as opposed to incentives—broadly conceived as resources related to fam-ily background and resources related toacademic performance—in explaining whywomen have caught up to men and outpacedthem in college completion. We develop a two-

FEMALE CCOLLEGE AADVANTAGE—–517



part strategy to achieve this goal. First, we the-orize about why the gender-specific effects ofparental resources may vary by family type andconsider the potential impact of family resourceson the rising gender gap. Second, we determinewhether aspects of the educational career,including academic performance and interme-diate educational transitions, mediate the effectsof parental resources on educational attainment.We examine whether a gender-specific changehas occurred in the role of academic perform-ance in college completion, and whether sucha change can be linked to the changing gender-specific effects of parental resources.

The first part of our study examines how thefemale-favorable trend in college completionevolved in recent decades and addresses thequestion of whether the gender gap emerged dif-ferently for groups with different social ori-gins. Using data from the General SocialSurveys, we find important changes in the gen-der-specific effects of family background dur-ing the second half of the 20th century. Incohorts born before the mid-1960s, daughterswere able to reach parity with sons only in theminority of families whose parents both werecollege educated, whereas parents with less edu-cation appeared to favor sons over daughters.But this pattern changed for cohorts born afterthe mid-1960s, such that the male advantagedeclined and even reversed in households withless well educated parents, or those with anabsent father.

The second part of our study uses data fromthe National Education Longitudinal Study(NELS-88, hereafter NELS) for the 1973–1974birth cohort to examine the role of gender dif-ferences in academic resources, including aca-demic performance and intermediateeducational transitions, as well as the role offamily background in explaining the femaleadvantage in college completion for recentcohorts. For the NELS cohort, the female advan-tage remains largest in families with absent orhigh school–educated fathers, but now extendsto all family types. The primary factor gener-ating a gender difference in college completionrates is the higher dropout rate from 4-year col-leges for males. Moreover, although girls out-perform boys in middle school and high schooland are more likely to enroll in postsecondaryeducation, girls are not more likely than boys toenroll in 4-year colleges. Via a decomposition

analysis, we map out the gender differentials inthe various pathways that lead to college com-pletion and assess the impact of academic per-formance and various educational transitionson the likelihood of college completion. Wefind that women’s superior academic perform-ance plays a large role (especially for whitewomen) in producing the gender gap in col-lege completion, but this effect remains latentuntil after the transition to college occurs, whenit manifests itself through the positive relation-ship between college performance and collegecompletion. A smaller portion of the femaleadvantage in college completion can be tracedback to the family of origin, specifically to gen-der-specific differences in the father’s educationor the absence of a father in the family duringmiddle school. These gender-specific effectsof the father’s status appear to have their primaryimpact on the likelihood of transitions betweensecondary and tertiary education and on collegecompletion, given attendance, rather than onacademic performance per se in high school orcollege.

EXPLANATIONS FFOR TTHE EEMERGENCEOF TTHE NNEW GGENDER GGAP

Explanations for the female-favorable trend inhigher education must be able to elucidate notonly how women caught up to men in highereducation, but also why the female rate nowexceeds and continues to pull away from themale rate of college completion. Sociologicaland economic approaches to the study of edu-cational attainment emphasize two major deter-minants. One determinant is incentives thatstem from the value of education, whether thisvalue is considered in terms of the labor mar-ket (Becker 1964) or the marriage market(DiPrete and Buchmann 2006; Goldin 1992,1995), or more broadly to include intellectualdevelopment as a necessary ingredient neededfor women to achieve the full development oftheir talents and faculties (Jacobs 1996). A sec-ond major determinant of educational attain-ment is resources. Sociological theories havelong recognized and research has repeatedlyconfirmed that family-based financial, social,and cultural resources all play a central role ineducational attainment.

Given their centrality in the attainmentprocess more generally, incentives and resources




arguably also play central roles in explaining therising gender gap in attainment that favorswomen. Women’s incentives to obtain moreeducation are linked with declining gender dis-crimination in the labor market and changingconceptions of the opportunity structure forwomen in society. Their ability to act on theseincentives depends on the resources provided byparents in early socialization during childhoodand on the resources provided by parents andschools in the education process during ado-lescence and young adulthood.

Declining gender discrimination or any othersource of change in the perceived value of edu-cation or work for women would be expected toaffect educational attainment via family process-es. Family economy perspectives view educa-tional attainment as a rational product of familydecision making. When faced with labor mar-kets and family systems that privilege males, afamily’s first priority should be the education ofsons (Becker 1991; Becker and Tomes 1979;Papanek 1985; Rosenzweig and Schultz 1982).In contrast, feminist theories attribute the his-torical tendency for American parents to favorsons over daughters in labor market–relevantinvestments to a patriarchal culture (Epstein1970; Hess and Ferree 1988; Walby 1986).5

From either perspective, changes in the per-ceived desirability of education for womencould have stimulated a new pattern of parentalinvestment and a reduction of the male advan-tage in educational attainment without regard tothe characteristics ascribed to the family of ori-gin.

Other perspectives predict that changinginvestment patterns are not uniform across fam-ilies, but rather depend on the socioeconomicand demographic characteristics attributed to the

family of origin. Heterogeneity in investmentpatterns across families, coupled with socioe-conomic and demographic trends in familiesand structural changes in labor markets andeducational institutions, arguably could haveproduced the observed reversal from a maleadvantage to the current female advantage incollege completion.

According to the gender-egalitarian per-spective, parents who are better educated tendto hold more egalitarian values and may striveto ensure that sons and daughters receive equaleducation. Many studies document more egal-itarian gender-role attitudes among individualswith higher levels of education both in theUnited States (Cherlin and Walters 1981;Thornton, Alwin, and Camburn 1983; Thorntonand Freedman 1979) and in European coun-tries (Alwin, Braun, and Scott 1992; Dryler1998). Research also suggests that gender-roleorientations have shifted gradually from a tra-ditional to a more egalitarian tendency over thepast few decades, but considerable heterogene-ity still exists in the American population (Axinnand Thornton 2000; Brewster and Padavic 2000;McHugh and Frieze 1997; Twenge 1997).According to the gender-egalitarian perspec-tive, if the “rate of return” to parents’ educationis higher for girls than for boys, then the com-bination of a stable higher rate of return toparental education for girls and historically ris-ing levels of parental education could lead to aclosing of the gender gap in higher educationthat traditionally favored men. The gender-egal-itarian approach to education could have spreadnot only as a result of rising parental educationlevels, but also as a result of less-educated par-ents emulating highly educated parents. Thediffusion of this egalitarian ethos could havecontributed to women’s catching up with men,but it cannot account for women exceeding menin their educational attainment. We empirical-ly assess the extent to which this pattern hasgrown over the period we consider, and whetherthis change is attributable to a compositionalchange or a diffusion of this cultural norm.

The gender-role socialization perspectivestresses the importance of gender-specific rolemodeling and argues that girls look to theirmothers and boys to their fathers as they devel-op their educational and occupational aspira-tions (Downey and Powell 1993; Powell andDowney 1997; Rosen and Aneshensel 1978). A


5 That women have experienced discriminationduring the course of American history is not in doubt.But it does not follow that discrimination extendedto all spheres of life. Nor does it follow that theextent of discrimination followed a monotonic trend.Considerable evidence indicates that gender gaps ineducation have alternately grown and shrunk duringthe past 150 years. The primary difference betweenthe experiences of women and men born in the late19th century was not in the opportunity for college,but rather in the opportunity for the college-educat-ed to combine work, marriage, and fertility (Goldin1992).



“family-structure” version of the gender-rolesocialization hypothesis predicts that because offathers’ importance as role models for sons,boys differentially suffer from the absence of afather in the household (e.g., Powell and Parcel1997; Sommers 2000).6 Thus, the rising pro-portion of households headed by women inrecent decades, attributable to rising rates ofdivorce and nonmarital childbearing (Cancianand Reed 2001), could result in a composition-al trend in education attainment that advantagesfemales over males. A compositional trend couldoccur also if the education and occupation of thesame-sex parent is more important to his or herchildren’s education than those of the opposite-sex parent. A female-favorable trend in highereducation would result from upward trends inparents’ status to the extent that maternal trendsare stronger than paternal trends, or to the extentthat the female-specific advantage from moth-ers is greater than the male-specific advantagefrom fathers.

Some researchers doubt the importance ofgender-role socialization. Using retrospectivedata provided by adult respondents born beforethe 1960s, Kalmijn (1994) estimated a set oftransition models for high school completionand higher educational attainment. He assessedwhether the status of mothers and fathers influ-ences the educational attainment of sons anddaughters equally, and whether the influenceof mothers’ status has changed over time.Kalmijn (1994:272) concluded that “the processof educational attainment is much the same formen and women,” but he studied a period beforethe female-favorable gap in higher educationhad emerged. Korupp, Ganzeboom, and VanDer Lippe (2002) likewise maintain that theeffects of a mother’s education and occupationare as important for sons as for daughters.

It also is possible that female-favorable trendsin higher education were produced by gender-specific changes in the salience of parentalresources. Cultural changes may have height-ened the importance of an educated mother asa career role model for girls. Similarly, in com-bination with the rise of female-headed house-

holds, structural changes may have increased thevulnerability of male children to educationallyrisky behaviors such as delinquency or gangmembership in the absence of a father.Meanwhile, changes in the structure of wageshave pushed blue-collar fathers to the marginsof middle-class status and may have therebydifferentially harmed the educational prospectsof their sons relative to their daughters. We con-sider whether such gender-specific changes inthe importance of parental resources explain, inpart, the female-favorable trend in college com-pletion.

How might educational performance con-tribute to this trend? One conjecture, frequent-ly cited in the press but not yet substantiatedempirically, is that female-favorable trends incollege completion are attributable to trends inacademic achievement, whereby girls outper-form boys in high school and engage in behav-iors that increase their likelihood of collegeenrollment. However, the inadequacy of thisexplanation, at least when taken in its popularform, is immediately apparent in light of evi-dence that girls have long outperformed boys inschool. Early research using survey data forhigh school students in the 1950s and 1960sfound that girls received higher grades thanboys, had higher class standing, and, by theearly 1970s, took courses as rigorous as thosetaken by boys (Alexander and Eckland 1974;Alexander and McDill 1976; Thomas,Alexander, and Eckland 1979). In fact, much ofthe previous research on gender differences ineducational attainment sought to explain theanomaly of women’s lower rates of collegeenrollment and completion in light of their supe-rior academic performance relative to men(Alexander and Eckland 1974; Jacobs 1996;Mickelson 1989). Given the long history of afemale advantage in academic performance,some other factor or factors must be changingfor this advantage to play a decisive role in theobserved trend in college completion. Declininggender discrimination, changing incentives forhigher education, and the impact of thesechanges on resource provision by families arelikely crucial elements in the process.

In fact, declining gender discrimination, ris-ing incentives for higher education, and subse-quent changes in families’ investments indaughters may have caused the female advan-tage in educational performance to grow in


6 But see Powell and Downey (1997) and Krein andBeller (1988) for equivocal findings concerning thefamily structure version gender-role socializationarguments.



recent decades. Using data from six U.S. nation-al probability samples spanning 1960 through1992, Hedges and Nowell (1995) found a larg-er variance in test scores for males than forfemales on some achievement tests, a gradualreduction of the male advantage in math and sci-ence tests, and no reduction in the female advan-tage in tests of reading and writing ability. Otherresearch indicates that compared with boys,girls possess higher levels of “noncognitive”skills (e.g., attentiveness and organizationalskills) that facilitate academic achievement andincrease their probability of college enrollment(Jacob 2002). Teachers consistently rate girls asputting forth more effort and as being less dis-ruptive than boys in high school (Downey andVogt Yuan 2005). Girls also are currently out-pacing boys in the number of college prepara-tory courses and the number of advancedplacement examinations they take in high school(Bae et al. 2000). We assess the role of such gen-der differences in academic performance andbehaviors in explaining the growing femaleadvantage in college completion.

A final explanation for the growing femaleadvantage in college completion that we con-sider is that the pathways into or through high-er education have changed in a gender-specificor gender-by-class–specific way. The secondhalf of the 20th century witnessed the dramat-ic expansion of both the community collegesystem and the 4-year college system. Statisticsfrom the October 2002 Current PopulationSurvey show that the 2-year college enrollmentadvantage of females is larger than their 4-yearcollege enrollment advantage.7 If communitycollege serves as a springboard to enrollmentand graduation from a 4-year college, the expan-sion of the community college system couldgenerate a female-favorable trend in collegecompletion. Similarly, given continued gendersegregation in college majors (Charles andBradley 2002; Jacobs 1999), if grade inflationwere stronger in female-dominated majors thanin male-dominated majors, and if college gradesinfluenced the probability of college completion,

the consequence would be a growing femaleadvantage in college completion that isexplained by gender differences in the distri-bution across majors.

None of these explanations are mutuallyexclusive, and each may have played some rolein causing females to outpace males in theircollege completion rates. Some of these expla-nations (e.g., the decline in discrimination andthe societal change in familial investment andsocialization patterns) are based on broadlyuncontested facts whose impact on education-al trends is nonetheless difficult to estimatewith precision. In the analyses that follow, wefirst address the potential of changing familyresources to account for the female-favorabletrend in higher education. We then assess therole of gender differences in academicresources, specifically differences in academicperformance and intermediate educational tran-sitions, in explaining the current female advan-tage in college completion. Throughout theseanalyses, we examine whether the relationshipsbetween gender-specific academic resourcesand college completion differ for different racialand social origin groups.

TRENDS IIN FFAMILY BBACKGROUNDAND TTHE GGROWING FFEMALEADVANTAGE IIN CCOLLEGECOMPLETION: AANALYSIS OOF DDATAFROM TTHE GGENERAL SSOCIAL SSURVEYS

To determine how family processes affectedthe female-favorable trend in college comple-tion, either alone or in combination with broad-er system-level changes, we analyze data fromthe cumulative cross-sectional General SocialSurveys from 1972 through 2002. The 24 annu-al General Social Surveys (GSS) administeredduring this period provide information on theeducational attainment of respondents and theirfathers and mothers, the socioeconomic statusof the fathers, and several other measures offamily background (National Opinion ResearchCenter 2003).8 The availability of data from


7 In 2002, females outpaced males in the secondyear of 4-year colleges at a rate of 1.22, and they out-paced males in the second year of 2-year colleges ata rate of 1.33. See http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2002.html for details.

8 The GSS was not administered in 1979, 1981,1992, 1995, 1997, or 1999, so the waves of data total24 over this 30-year interval. Surveys were not con-ducted in 1979, 1981, and 1992 because of fundingshortages. Since 1994, the GSS survey has been



1972 to 2002 makes the GSS valuable for exam-ining trends in higher education during the peri-od when the shift from a male to a femaleadvantage in college completion occurred.

We restrict the analysis of college completionto white respondents between the ages of 25 and34 years who were born between 1938 and 1977(the black GSS sample is too small to supporta similar trend analysis). The dependent variable,college completion, is operationalized as thecompletion of at least 16 years of education.Definitions of all variables are provided inAppendix A.

We begin by examining the relationshipbetween parents’ education, fathers’ absence,and rates of male and female college comple-tion for two specific historical periods. It shouldbe noted that for all the analyses in this reportwe follow the conventions of the GSS and NELSsurvey data such that “mother” means anyfemale guardian and “father” means any maleguardian. The first period covers birth cohortsborn between 1938 and 1965 and includes peo-ple who grew up before the point at whichwomen overtook men in their rates of collegecompletion.9 The second period covers birth

cohorts between 1966 and 1977 and includesthose who grew up during the time when womenbegan to overtake men in their college gradua-tion rates. These results are presented in Table 1.

Panel A shows that for cohorts born in 1965or earlier, males are more likely than females tohave completed college in all except one of thefamily types displayed. Only when both parentshad at least some college education were womenas likely as men to have completed college.When either fathers or mothers had a highschool education or less, sons were more like-ly to complete college than daughters. If nofather was in the household when the youthwere 16 years old, sons still were more likely tocomplete college than daughters. This pattern isconsistent with the gender-egalitarian perspec-tive. It provides little support for the gender-rolesocialization perspective, which predicts high-er graduation rates for daughters of educatedmothers. In fact, the female disadvantage isgreater for families in which the mother hassome college and the father has a high schooleducation or less (37.7 – 23.9 percent = 13.8 per-cent) than it is for families in which the fatherhas some college and the mother has a highschool education or less (41.6 – 34.6 percent =7.0 percent).


administered every other year, with roughly doublethe usual sample size (Inter-university Consortium forPolitical and Social Research [ICPSR] 2003).

9 We exclude cohorts born before 1938 because thehistorical period of their youth, which was dominat-

Table 1. College Completion Rates by Parents’ Education and Family Structure, GSS data

Father’s Education

High school Some college Fatheror less or more not present

Mother’s Education Male Female Male Female Male Female

A. White 1938–1965 Birth CohortsA. High school or less % 19.5 14.3 41.6 34.6 19.3 13.5

N 1,349 1,649 330 365 197 281—Some college or more % 37.7 23.9 60.2 63.1 35.1 30.0

N 183 239 374 429 77 70B. White 1966–1977 Birth CohortsB. High school or less % 12.4 16.6 38.8 33.6 13.7 13.1

N 241 271 103 110 73 84B. Some college or more % 26.2 40.8 61.5 63.6 26.1 37.0

N 65 71 174 195 46 54

Source: Authors’ calculations of 1972–2002 General Social Survey data.Note: Table shows percent of white males and females ages 25–34 that have completed college. GSS = GeneralSocial Surveys.

ed by the Great Depression and World War II, is sodifferent from the postwar period.



Panel B of Table 1 shows a different patternfor the 1966–1977 birth cohorts. It suggeststhe emergence of a strong gender-role social-ization effect. In cases involving parents whoboth had at least some college education, thecompletion rates for males and females lookvery similar to those of the earlier cohorts inPanel A. But in all other cells, the changes ingraduation rates are quite large, and general-ly to the advantage of females. Where fathershad a high school education or less, daughtersincreased their rates of college completion,whereas the graduation rates of sons dropped,regardless of the mothers’ level of education.The graduation rates of sons who had no fatherpresent at the age of 16 years also droppedconsiderably. Only in families in which fathershave some college and mothers have a highschool education or less do males maintain aconsiderable advantage (5.2 percent) overfemales. In contrast, daughters had a 14.6 per-cent advantage in college completion oversons in families with mothers who had somecollege and fathers who had a high schooleducation or less. A shift appears to have takenplace between these two periods such that themother’s level of education has become moreimportant for daughters and the father’s levelof education has become more important forsons.

While informative, Table 1 provides no testfor the statistical significance of the apparentinteraction between family background,cohort, and gender. To address this issue, weestimated a logistic regression of college com-pletion on the effects of family background.These results are presented in Table 2. Model1 includes a dummy variable for the period (1= 1966–1977 cohor ts, 0 = 1938–1965cohorts), gender (1 = female), the mother’seducation (1 = at least some college, 0 = highschool or less), the father’s education (1 = atleast some college, 0 = high school or less),and no father present in the household whenthe youth are 16 years of age. It also includesall possible two-way interaction effectsbetween these variables plus a two-way inter-action involving gender and the combinationof no father present or father’s education ofhigh school or less; a three-way interactioninvolving gender, cohort, and the combinationof no father present or father’s education ofhigh school or less; and a three-way interac-

tion involving gender, cohort, and mother’seducation.

The estimates in Model 1 show that maleswho had no father in the household at the ageof 16 years or whose father completed a highschool education or less had significantly high-er odds of completing college than similarlysituated females in the earlier cohorts (the effecton the logit is .303). But this relative advantagebecame a relative disadvantage for males bornafter 1965 (the coefficient is .303–.801). Itshould be noted that Model 1 provides no evi-dence that females in the later cohorts obtaineda gender-specific advantage from their mothers’education. The estimated effect of the three-way interaction is positive (.221), but smallerthan its standard error.

Model 2 includes all two- and three-wayinteractions involving father status, gender, andcohort, and further includes all interactionsinvolving age, gender, and cohort. The resultsfor Model 2 are presented in standard log lin-ear contrasts (i.e., the effects from each set ofcontrasts are constrained to total 0). This modelhas virtually the same substantive implicationsas Model 1. There is strong evidence of a struc-tural shift in the gender-specific effects of par-ents’education on the educational attainment oftheir same-sex children. The effect of the inter-action between father having some college edu-cation, gender, and cohort (.242) is statisticallysignificant, indicating that the salience offathers’ college education for their sons’ likeli-hood of college completion increased in latercohorts.10 The three-way interaction coefficientsinvolving father further imply that the mostimportant change over time concerns the con-trast between having a father who went to col-lege and having either a high school–educatedfather or no father in the household. Contrastsbetween the presence of a father in the house-hold and the presence of either a high school–


10 We tested different cut points, including1964/1965 and 1966/1967, and also estimated a spec-ification that included an interaction between father,gender, and cohort specified as the birth year. Thefinding of a structural shift in the gender-specificeffects of father’s education on the probability ofcollege completion is robust to the particular way thatcohort is specified.




or college-educated father did not change sig-nificantly over time.

In the absence of a structural shift, the gen-der egalitarianism observed during the firstperiod would have created a female-favorabletrend in college completion. In other words, inthe earlier period, the most gender-egalitarianfamilies were those with the most educated par-ents. As overall education rises, this patternwould spread, representing a change in the com-position of American families. However, thischange alone would be insufficient to accountfor the gender reversal in educational attain-ment. The extent of change attributable to this

type of compositional shift is demonstrated viaa simulation based on Model 2 in Table 2 thatcompares the experiences of GSS respondentsborn between 1940 and 1945 with those bornbetween 1970 and 1975 (complete simulationresults available from the authors). If nothingchanged between these two sets of cohortsexcept the distribution of families with a fatherpresent and the distribution of parental educa-tion, the coefficients for the early cohort modelwould have implied a reduction in themale–female gap in college completion, from6.3 percentage points in favor of men (27.3 per-cent for men vs. 21.0 percent for women) to 4.4

Table 2. Logistic Regression Coefficients, College Completion for Whites 25–34 Years Old, GSS Survey Years1972–2002

Model 1 Model 2

Dummy Variable Log–linearContrasts Contrasts

� (SE) � (SE)

Birth Cohort 1966+ (vs. 1938–1965) .318 (.285) –.226 (.381)Female –.136 (.133) .682 (.381)Later Cohorts � Female –.107 (.272) .733 (.381)Mother Some College .737** (.134) .447** (.056)Later Cohorts � Mother Some College .079 (.218) .050 (.037)No Father Present –.031 (.129) –.009 (.116)Father Some College 1.285** (.113) 1.237** (.083)Later Cohorts � No Father –.107 (.226) –.036 (.114)Later Cohorts � Father Some College –.390 (.211) .023 (.082)Mother Some College � Female .120 (.147) .058 (.037)No Father Present � Female –.069 (.112)Father Some College � Female –.088 (.081)Mother Some College � No Father .108 (.208) .058 (.104)Mother Some College � Father Some College .150 (.138) .077 (.069)No Father or Father ≤HS � Male .303* (.143)No Father or Father ≤HS � Male � Later Cohorts –.801** (.293)Mother Some College � Female � Later Cohorts .221 (.295) .029 (.037)No Father � Female � Later Cohorts –.087 (.112)Father Some College � Male � Later Cohorts .242** (.081)

Age Main Effects (omitted) (included)2- and 3-way Interactions between—Age and (Gender, Cohort) (omitted) (included)Constant 1.695** (.140) 1.969** (.382)

N 7,024 7,024df 15 21

Note: Dummy variable effects are contrasts against the omitted reference category. Log linear effects sum to zeroover the categories of the variable. GSS = General Social Surveys; Later Cohorts = Birth Cohort 1966+; SE =robust standard error; ≤HS = high school or less.* p ≤ .05; ** p ≤ .01 (two-tailed tests).




percentage points in favor of men (38.0 percentfor men vs. 33.6 percent for women). Thus,although these compositional shifts would havenarrowed the male advantage in education, theywould have been insufficient to produce afemale advantage.

The emergence of a female advantage in edu-cation is attributable to a reversal in the gender-specific effects of father status. Even as thegender egalitarianism of college-educated par-ents remained essentially stable across the post-war decades covered by the GSS data, thedisadvantage for sons of high school–educatedfathers grew relative to that for daughters. Thisgrowing disadvantage constituted a reversalfrom the pattern at midcentury, when the rate ofreturn to father’s college education was higherfor daughters than for sons, to the pattern of thecurrent period, when the rate of return to father’scollege education is higher for sons than fordaughters.

The results in Table 2 demonstrate thatchanges in the gender gap in college comple-tion vary by family background, but they do notshow the substantive magnitude of this varia-tion. To show this magnitude, we compare theactual changes in the proportion of men andwomen completing college with the predictedchanges from a model that assumes a homo-geneous rate of change regardless of family

background.11 In Table 3, the predictions fromthis model of homogeneous change are com-pared with the actual proportions of respon-dents who completed college in Columns 1 and2. By differencing the female and male changes,we obtained the actual and predicted femalegain relative to the male gain in college com-pletion, which are reported in Columns 3 and4. Column 5 reports the discrepancy between theactual relative change and the relative changepredicted by the model of homogeneous change.Column 5 shows a substantively large discrep-ancy (a difference of .199 in the proportioncompleting college) between the actual femalegain in college completion and the gain pre-dicted from the model of homogeneous changewhen father had a high school education or less.The actual gap is smaller than the predictedgap from the baseline model whenever fatherwas present and had a college education. Thus,

Table 3. Actual versus Predicted Change in Proportion Completing College

Period Change Female Gain Relative to Male Gain

Parental Status Gender Actual Predicted Actual Predicted Discrepancy

Mother Education: ≤HS—No father at age 16 Male –.056 –.036 .052 .054 –.003

Female –.004 .019—Father education: ≤HS Male –.071 –.036 .094 .056 .038

Female .024 .020—Father education: Some College Male –.028 –.061 .018 .096 –.078

Female –.010 .036Mother Education: Some College—No father at age 16 Male –.090 –.054 .160 .088 .072

Female .070 .034—Father education: ≤HS Male –.116 –.052 .285 .085 .199

Female .169 .033—Father education: Some College Male .013 –.066 –.008 .102 –.110

Female .005 .036

Note: Table reports actual change in proportion completing college versus predicted change from a model thatassumes that the female–favorable trend is the same for everyone regardless of family background; ≤HS = highschool or less.

11 To obtain the baseline, we estimated a logitmodel for the probability of college completion as afunction of age, gender, father’s education or nofather present, mother’s education, and cohort. Thismodel contained interaction effects between genderand father’s education, gender and mother’s educa-tion, and gender and cohort group, but included noother interaction effects involving cohort group.



the gender gap in college completion hasemerged unevenly across different family back-ground groups.12

In summary, we find no strong evidence thatthe female-favorable trend in college is beingdriven by compositional changes in the familysituation that would give women a specificadvantage over men in the educational attain-ment process. The gender-egalitarian hypothe-sis provides an accurate description of outcomesfor cohorts born at midcentury, but the trend pre-diction from this hypothesis is wrong. In fam-ilies with parents who both are college educated,male and female college completion rates arehigh and roughly constant throughout the obser-vation period. But in families with fathers whoare absent or have low levels of education, therehas been a shift from a male advantage in theearlier period to a female advantage in the laterperiod. Nor do the results support the gender-role socialization perspective, which predicts alarger or growing impact of maternal status ondaughters, as compared with sons. Rather, mostof the shift stems from the growing vulnerabil-ity of boys who are sons of high school–edu-cated or absent fathers. Clearly, thefemale-favorable trend in college completionemerged unevenly, and its development variesby family of origin status. As we show in the fol-lowing discussion, these trends have produceda contemporary situation in which women typ-ically have equal or higher rates of college com-pletion than men across a range of family types.

GENDERED PPATHWAYS TTO CCOLLEGECOMPLETION: AANALYSIS OOF NNELSDATA

The GSS data can be used to identify trends, butthey lack the detailed information needed touncover the factors that explain the contempo-rary female advantage in college completion. Todetermine the source of this advantage and itslink to family background and school per-formance, we analyze data from NELS for asample of cohorts born in 1973 or 1974.13 InNELS, information on background and educa-tional experiences is provided through the year2000 for a nationally representative sample ofyouth in eighth grade in 1988.

We first examine the same relationshipsamong parents’education, family structure, andcollege completion with the NELS data that weexamined with the GSS data. Then, in an attemptto establish how the female advantage in collegecompletion arises, we investigate both familybackground and academic-related sources ofthe gender gap in recent years. Specifically, wetake a thorough account of potential gender dif-ferences in high school academic performance,the rigor of the high school curriculum, time use,educational expectations, and potentially prob-lematic behaviors that may influence subse-quent college enrollment and completion.Appendix B lists all the variables included in theanalyses to account for these factors.

After we determine the impact of gender dif-ferences in high school behaviors on collegeenrollment, we assess the role of communitycollege as an indirect route to 4-year collegecompletion as a source of the female advantage.Finally, we examine gender differences in aca-demic performance and the choice of a majorin college and assess their role in producingthe gender gap in 4-year college completion.


12 Our results differ from those of Kalmijn (1994),who concluded that mothers’ and fathers’ statusesinfluence sons’ and daughters’ educational attain-ment equally. We find that a shift has taken place inthe interaction between gender and parental status,which implies a three-way interaction betweenparental variables, gender, and cohort. Kalmijnfocused on significance of two-way interaction effectsbetween parental status and gender. Other importantdifferences are that Kalmijn’s data lack birth cohortsborn after 1960 and he restricted the sample torespondents in two-parent families and to those whoprovided information about their father’s educationand occupation (data more likely to be missing whenfather absent during childhood).

13 Because NELS was a study of eighth graders in1988, the great majority of NELS respondents wereborn in these years, but 6 percent of the sample wasborn in 1972 or earlier.




FAMILY BACKGROUND AND COLLEGE

COMPLETION: CCOMPARISON OF NELS AND

GSS CCOHORTS

We first examine the relationship between par-ents’ education, family structure, and rates ofmale and female college completion for theNELS sample and compare these results withthose obtained with the GSS sample. Becausethe NELS sample is considerably larger than thecorresponding GSS sample, we also are able toanalyze these relationships for blacks and com-pare the patterns of association between fami-ly background and college completion for blacksand whites.

These results for the NELS white sample(Table 4, Panel A) are similar to those for thePeriod 2 GSS sample (Table 1, Panel B) inshowing that females have moved ahead ofmales in families wherein they once laggedconsiderably behind—families with low-edu-cated or absent fathers. As a further check on theconsistency of this finding in the two data sets,we substituted the NELS data for the second-period GSS data. The trend results foundbetween the first- and second-period GSS dataare reproduced when we substitute the NELSdata for the second-period GSS data (see detailsin our Online Supplement on ASR Web site:http://www2.asanet.org/journals/asr/2006/toc052.html). The NELS data were collectedat a later point in history than most of the datashown in Panel B of Table 1. The NELS sam-

ple consists of cohorts born in 1973–1974,toward the end of the years covered by the GSScohorts (1966–1977). This may explain whythe growth in a female advantage in some fam-ily types that we observe between Panels A andB in Table 1 appears to have spread to other fam-ily types for the birth cohorts of the mid-1970s.

Table 4, Panel B, shows the results for blackNELS sample members. The pattern for blacksis similar to that for whites, except that the gen-der gaps favoring females are even larger forblacks. Table 5 reports tests for associationsinvolving race, gender, parental variables, andcollege outcomes when the data in Panels Aand B of Table 4 are analyzed jointly. The largesignificant association between race and collegecompletion indicates that blacks have lowerrates of college completion than whites. Thesignificant three-way association between gen-der, race, and college completion indicates thatblack males have lower college completion ratesrelative to females than white males. The advan-tage of having a college-educated mother isgreater for whites than for blacks, as indicatedby the significant three-way association betweenmother’s education, race, and college comple-tion. The signif icant four-way associationbetween father’s status, gender, race, and collegecompletion indicates that the advantage of hav-ing a college-educated father for males relativeto females is greater for blacks than for whites.As we shall see later, the inclusion of addition-

Table 4. College Completion Rates by Parents’ Education and Family Structure, NELS 1988–2000

Father’s Education

High school Some college Fatheror less or more not present

Mother’s Education Male Female Male Female Male Female

A. WhitesA. High school or less % 13.8 17.2 32.7 37.0 8.8 14.8—— N 978 1,096 383 416 200 255—Some college or more % 25.6 34.6 56.8 63.7 26.4 44.4—— N 238 283 1,132 1,180 194 196B. BlacksA. High school or less % 4.3 21.9 15.7 21.7 5.0 15.4—— N 89 109 23 25 57 133B. Some college or more % 9.2 22.8 37.4 44.1 10.8 25.9—— N 26 32 80 84 54 73

Source: Authors’ calculations from 1988–2000 National Education Longitudinal Study data.

Note: Table shows percent of males and females who have completed college. NELS = National EducationalLongitudinal Survey.




al NELS88 covariates in more complex modelsmediated most of the effects of parental vari-ables on college outcomes, and their inclusioncaused most interaction effects involving raceto become insignificant. Although we includethe white, black, and other minority samples inthe analyses that follow, we report only inter-action effects involving race when they are sta-tistically significant or useful for interpretation.Otherwise, we exclude them from the tables.

ACADEMIC PERFORMANCE, EEDUCATIONAL

TRANSITIONS, AND THE CONTEMPORARY

GENDER GAP

To establish how the female advantage in high-er education arises, we analyze the relationshipbetween gender and achievement outcomes atdifferent points in the educational career. Table6 provides an overview of the results to followby showing the relationship between gender,postsecondary enrollment, 4-year college enroll-ment, and 4-year college completion. The toppanel reports logistic regression coefficients,and the bottom panel reports proportions offemales and males who attained each outcome.Table 6 presents the surprising result that thegender gap in college completion actually aris-es very late in the educational career for NELSrespondents. Although females are significant-ly more likely to enroll in postsecondary edu-cation, they are no more likely than males toenroll in a 4-year college.14 From a statistical

perspective, the entire female advantage arisesfrom the probability of completing a 4-year col-lege course, given that one enrolls in a 4-yearcollege.15 This need not mean that girls have noadvantage over boys earlier in the educationalcareer. Rather, whatever advantage they havedoes not express itself until this final educationaltransition.

Although female students had no advantageover male students in rates of college enrollment,the results in Table 6 represent an historicaladvance for women, in that females used to besignificantly less likely than males to enroll incollege. For example, Alexander and Eckland(1974) showed that despite female advantagesin academic performance in high school,females from the high school class of 1972were less likely to enroll in college than males.In results not shown, we established that femaleNELS respondents had significantly higher aca-demic performance in eighth grade and highschool than their male counterparts. Table 7shows the implications of the better academicperformance of females for college enrollment,conditional on the completion of high school.Model 1 underscores the point that despite their

Table 5. Tests of Associations Involving Race, Gender, Parental Variables, and College Completion

Interactions Wald �2 df p > �2

Race �College Completion 43.38 1 .000Female—� College Completion 50.08 1 .000—� Race �College Completion 8.27 1 .004Mother Education—� College Completion 72.06 1 .000—� Father Education/Present �College Completion 8.04 2 .018—� Father Education/Present �Race �College Completion 2.71 2 .258—� Race � College Completion 4.02 1 .045Father Education/Present—� College Completion 119.65 2 .000—� Female � College Completion 11.59 2 .003—� Female � Race � College Completion 6.53 2 .038—� Race � College Completion .13 2 .937

gap favoring females has emerged for 4-year collegeenrollment. In the fall of 2002, females comprised55.5 percent of all students enrolling in 4-year col-leges (U.S. Department of Education 2004, table176).

15 Column 2 reports results based on the full sam-ple. The results are very similar if the sample isrestricted to students who received a high schooldiploma or a GED.

14 Note that in the 15 years since NELS respon-dents were at risk for enrolling in college, a gender




better performance in high school, females haveno net advantage in 4-year college enrollment.Model 2 introduces controls for family back-ground and interaction effects between genderand race. This model shows the expected posi-tive effects of parental education on collegeenrollment. There is no significant femaleadvantage in college enrollment for any of thethree racial groups, although the point estimatefor the interaction effect between black andfemale is consistent with other data (e.g., U.S.Department of Education 2004, Table 206) insuggesting that black females had an enroll-ment advantage over black males in the early1990s. Column 3 includes controls for highschool class rank, the rigor of the high schoolcurriculum, and the full set of academic andnonacademic behaviors described in AppendixB. The results confirm that grades, curriculum,and behaviors in high school are important pre-dictors of the probability of 4-year collegeenrollment. It should be noted that net of thesefactors, females actually have a slight disad-vantage in college enrollment according to thepoint estimates. Comparing the female coeffi-cients in Models 1 and 3, we see that the female

advantage in grades and other behaviors eras-es the small female disadvantage that exists netof these factors, and brings females to the par-ity with males in 4-year college enrollment thatwe saw in Table 6.

We next examine the impact of gender dif-ferences in community college enrollmentand in the rate of transition from communitycollege to 4-year college on college comple-tion for NELS respondents. We conduct adecomposition analysis that maps out theprobability of college completion into theconditional probability of the various path-ways that lead to this outcome, some of whichinvolve enrolling in community college.Because we are interested in the college com-pletion gap for the entire cohort, we do notcondition on high school completion when weestimate these probabilities because thiswould cause gender differences in high schoolcompletion to be omitted from the calculation.We call all non–4-year postsecondary educa-tion “2-year” college. It follows that thereare three types of postsecondary attendance:(a) 4-year college attendance only, (b) 2-year

Table 6. Logistic Regression Coefficients, Post-Secondary Enrollment, 4-Year College Enrollment and 4-YearCollege Completion, NELS 1988–2000

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4 Model 5

4YC 4YCCompletion, Completion,

Post- given givenSecondary 4YC 4YC 4YC 4YC onlyEnrollment Enrollment Completion Enrollment Enrollment

Female .219** .037 .234** .368** .454**(.077) (.061) (.059) (.079) (.105)

Constant 1.151** .055 –.934** .207** .740**(.059) (.046) (.044) (.567) (.077)

N 10,820 10,759 10,729 6,014 3,512

Proportion Proportion Proportion Proportion Proportion

Female .80 .52 .33 .63 .75[5,771] [5,771] [5,771] [3,281] [1,900]

Male .76 .51 .28 .55 .67[5,056] [5,056] [5,056] [2,845] [1,693]

Note: Data shown as coefficients (robust standard errors are in parentheses); the N for frequencies are in brack-ets. First three models are for the full sample, model 4 limits sample to those who ever enrolled in a 4-year col-lege, model 5 limits sample to those who only enrolled in 4-year college. 4YC = 4 year college; NELS = NationalEducational Longitudinal Survey.** p ≤ .01 (two-tailed tests).




college attendance only, and (c) attendance insome combination of 2- and 4-year college.16

In addition to showing the results of this

decomposition, Table 8 reports useful statisticsabout the postsecondary attendance patterns ofmales and females. Column 1 shows that 28percent of men and 33 percent of women com-

cational institutions. As is shown later, such finer dis-tinctions are unnecessary for understanding the gen-der difference in 4-year college completion rates.

Table 7. Logistic Coefficients for 4-year College Enrollment, given High School Diploma or Equivalent, NELS1988–2000

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3

.� (SE) .� (SE) .� (SE)

Female .061 (.065) .076 (.073) –.155 (.117)Race (white = ref.)—Black –.465** (.141) –.410 (.240) –.255 (.241)—Other –.385** (.078) –.065 (.137) –.460** (.137)Female � Black .— .427 (.313) not included (NS)Female � Other Race .— –.148 (.185) not included (NS)Mother Some College .— .827** (.079) .542** (.120)Father Some College .— 1.151** (.084) .695** (.121)Father Present .— –.055 (.110) .042 (.184)Controls for—High school——academic performance———Missing .— .— –.847** (.237)———2nd quintile .— .— –.334 (.188)———3rd quintile .— .— –.626** (.159)———4th quintile .— .— –1.154** (.194)———Lowest quintile .— .— –1.838** (.221)—Academic intensity——Missing .— .— –1.426** (.492)——2nd quintile .— .— –.565** (.219)——3rd quintile .— .— –1.261** (.205)——4th quintile .— .— –1.585** (.208)——Lowest quintile .— .— –1.838** (.221)—Ever in AP course .— .— .289** (.114)—Average grade in English .— .— –.003 (.007)—Average grade in Math .— .— –.003 (.007)—Ever in fight .— .— –.212 (.163)

Constant .426** (.046) –.415** (.109) 1.896* (.863)

N 9,913 8,314 6,669df 1 8 67

Note: The top quintile is the reference category for High School academic performance and Academic intensity.Model 3 includes additional controls for high school academic performance (12th grade standardized test scoresin reading, math, science, and social studies; grades in science and social studies), curriculum (ever attendedremedial math or English class), and behaviors (number of times skipped school, ever in trouble in school, hoursof homework done per week, hours worked during school, hours of TV watched on weekdays, frequency ofcoming to class without pencil, books or paper) and educational expectations in 12th grade. See Appendix B fordetails. AP = advanced placement; SE = robust standard error; NS = not statistically significant; NELS =National Educational Longitudinal Survey.* p ≤ .05; ** p ≤.01 (two-tailed tests).

16 We do not distinguish here between those whostarted 2-year college, then made a single transitionto 4-year college and the numerous other paths thatcould lead a student between these two groups of edu-




pleted 4-year college; 47 percent of men and 50percent of women attended 2-year college; trans-fers between 2- and 4-year college were com-mon; 48 percent of men and 46 percent ofwomen who attended 2-year college also attend-ed 4-year college. Only 29 percent of men andwomen exclusively attended 4-year college. Itcan be seen that the rates of college completionare significantly higher for males and femaleswho attended only 4-year college (68 and 77percent, respectively) than for those who attend-ed 2- and 4-year college (39 and 47 percent,respectively), and that for both types of atten-dance, higher percentages of females than malescomplete college.

To determine whether gender differences in2-year college attendance rates and in transitionrates from 2- to 4-year college can explain thefemale advantage in college completion, wesuccessively assigned to males the female prob-ability for each pathway to college completion.We further elaborated the decomposition toshow the impact of gender differences in col-lege-level academic performance. To do this, weestimated a simple model for college comple-tion that contained only gender and grades, andused this to determine the proportion of thefemale advantage resulting from higher collegegrades and the proportion not explained bygrades. The decomposition allows us to deter-mine the impact that each of these componentshas on the total difference (.051) between thefemale and male rates of college completion.

The female advantage in 2-year college atten-dance has only a small impact on the female

advantage in 4-year college completion. Thegender gap would diminish by only 12.7 percentif men attended 2-year college at the same rateas women. Because among 2-year college atten-dees, males are more likely than females totransition to 4-year college given 2-year collegeattendance, the explained portion of the gapwould shrink to 6.4 percent if males had thefemale rate of transition between 2- and 4-yearcollege. But males in this population have lowercollege grades than females, and this shortfallproduces a substantial 32.8 percent of the gen-der gap, leaving only an additional 6.3 percentof the gap to be explained by advantages among2- and 4-year attendees that are not associatedwith females’ higher grades. Females were nomore likely than males to enroll only in 4-yearcollege, but the gender gap in college perform-ance for these students plays a major role,explaining another 44.8 percent of the gendergap in college completion. The remaining 6.5percent of the gap could be attributed to femaleadvantages among the population of 4-year onlyattendees that are not associated with collegegrades. This decomposition makes it clear that2-year colleges play a potentially major role inthe overall proportion of men and women whofinish 4-year college, but that their role in pro-ducing the female advantage in college com-pletion is small.

Considering the importance of academic per-formance in explaining the college completiongap, Table 9 explores the determinants of col-lege performance in greater detail. Model 1,which controls only for race and family back-

Table 8. Decomposition of Gender Gap in College Completion through Various Pathways, NELS 1988–2000

4YCA, BA, Given Given 4YCA 4YCA BA, Given

Probability of: BA 2YCA 2YCA and 2YCA Only Only 4YCA

Male .28 .47 .48 .39 .— .29 .68 .—Males Estimated with—Female Grade Distribution .— .— .— .46 .46 .— .76 .76

Female .33 .50 .46 .— .47 .29 .— .77Gender Gap .051

Percent of Total Gap Eliminated if Each—Transition Rate Were Equalized——Unique effects .— 12.7% –6.3% 32.8% 6.3% 3.2% 44.8% 6.5%——Cumulative effects .— 12.7% 6.4% 39.2% 45.5% 48.7% 93.5% 100.0%

Note: BA = Bachelor’s degree; 2YCA = 2-year college attendance; 4YCA = 4-year college attendance; NELS =National Educational Longitudinal Survey.




ground, provides evidence that the femaleadvantage in college academic performancevaries by race, with the coefficient for whitesabout twice as large as the coefficient for non-whites. In line with prior research (Kao andThompson 2003), our results indicate that blacksget significantly lower grades in college. Model2 indicates that adding a comprehensive set ofcontrols (for high school class rank, high schoolcurriculum, educational expectations, and otherbehaviors during high school, as well as forcollege major, college type, and college selec-tivity) reduces the female advantage in collegegrade point average (GPA) to a .1 advantage ona 4.0 scale. Although small, this advantageremains statistically significant. It should benoted that the interaction effect between femaleand other race suggests that this gender differ-ence does not exist for other minorities net ofthe other variables in Model 2.

Finally, we examine in Table 10 how the racialdifferences in the female advantage in collegecompletion are mediated by college type, col-lege major, and college grades for the sampleof those who ever enrolled in 4-year college.17

Panel A reports the female coefficient from amodel that contains the main effects for race andincludes the covariates indicated in the table.Panel B reports the race-specific female coef-ficients. For each model, we also report the per-centage of the female coefficient that remainsto be explained, net of the additional coeffi-cients.

The results in Panel A demonstrate that thefemale advantage over males is largely attrib-utable to the superior performance of women incollege (e.g., 70 – 5 percent = 65 percent). PanelB suggests that blacks and other minorities dif-fer from whites in that a smaller proportion ofthe female advantage comes from gender dif-ferences in performance (e.g., 19 and 48 percent,respectively). For blacks, more of the femaleadvantage appears to be linked with gender dif-ferences in type of college and college majorsselected. For other minorities, a relatively largefraction of the female advantage in college com-pletion rates is unexplained by college type,college major, or performance. In short, thesimple story that women graduate in highernumbers because they do better in college islargely a story about white women. For blacksand other minorities, more research is needed

17 We conducted the same analyses for the samplethat enrolled only in 4-year college, and the patternof results was very similar.

Table 9. OLS Regression Coefficients for College Academic Performance (GPA), NELS 1988–2000

Model 1 Model 2

Coefficient (SE) Coefficient (SE)

Female .263** (.026) .100** (.025)Race (white = ref.)—Black –.443** (.076) –.254** (.070)—Other .001 (.053) .006 (.051)Female � Black –.120 (.144) .029 (.085)Female � Other Race –.145* (.071) –.091 (.065)Mother Some College .147** (.034) .021 (.026)Father Some College .149** (.035) .084** (.027)Father Present .058 (.060) .003 (.039)

High School and College-Level Controls .no .yes

Constant 2.425** (.060) 3.296** (.507)

N 5,032 4,249df 8 87

Note: Model 2 includes controls for all high school performance, curriculum and behaviors and college-levelindicators detailed in Appendix B. SE = robust standard error; GPA = grade point average; NELS = NationalEducational Longitudinal Survey. * p ≤ .05; ** p ≤ .01 ( two-tailed tests).




to establish more clearly how the female advan-tage arises.

GENDER-SPECIFIC FAMILY BACKGROUND

EFFECTS

As seen earlier, Table 1 demonstrates that thefemale disadvantage in college completion expe-rienced by the cohorts from the middle of the20th century existed mainly in the householdsof families who were not college educated, andthat the major change which occurred was thatgirls in these households caught up with theirbrothers and surpassed them. This significantchange in the effects of family background overtime produced a situation for the NELS cohortsin which the female advantage remained largestin families with absent or high school–educat-ed fathers, but extended to all family types. Inour multivariate analyses, we tested for the gen-der-specific advantages of family backgroundfor both academic performance and the rate oftransition between education levels net of per-formance. Because of the many models

involved, we summarize only the conclusions ofour analyses.

First, we found no statistically significantgender-specific effects of family background onacademic performance in eighth grade, highschool, or college. Rather the gender-specificeffects of family background involved educa-tional transitions net of performance and othercovariates. In the analysis of college enroll-ment, we found that father’s education is moreimportant for sons’ than for daughters’ collegeenrollment. In the analysis of college comple-tion, given enrollment, we found evidence ofgender differences in the effects from theabsence of a father. Among those who enrollonly in 4-year colleges, the absence of a fatheris associated with a reduced likelihood of col-lege completion for males, but not for females.This pattern is found in the model that controlsonly for race and family background, and itpersists in a model that adds controls for collegetype, college major, and academic perform-ance. These findings are consistent with thepattern shown in the GSS data, indicating that

Table 10. Logistic Regression Coefficients for College Completion, NELS 1988–2000

Model 1 Model 2 Model 3 Model 4

Panel A. Main Effect Of Female Only—Female .479** .335** .025 –.005

(.089) (.128) (.130) (.130)——Percent of coefficient in column 1 100% 70% 5% –1%

Panel B. Race–Specific Female Effects—White female .419** .295* –.046 –.075

(.098) (.144) (.146) (.145)——Percent of coefficient in column 1 100% 70% –11% –18%

—Black female 1.015** .507 .319 .303(.387) (.426) (.468) (.472)

——Percent of coefficient in column 1 100% 50% 31% 28%

—Other female .429* .487 .284 .236(.199) (.254) (.249) (.252)

——Percent of coefficient in column 1 100% 114% 66% 55%

Included Covariates—Social background yes yes yes yes—College attributes yes yes yes—College GPA yes yes—College GPA � major yes

Note: Data shown as coefficients (robust standard errors are in parentheses). Social Background covariatesinclude mother some college, father some college, father present; College Attribute covariates include collegetype, selectivity and major. GPA = grade point average; NELS = National Educational Longitudinal Survey.* p ≤ .05; ** p ≤ .01 ( two-tailed tests).



fathers’ education and fathers’ absence havebecome more important for the educationalattainment of sons than for the educationalattainment of daughters in more recent cohorts.In summary, the gender-specific effects offather’s status have their primary impact on thelikelihood of the transition into 4-year collegeand college completion, given enrollment, ratherthan on academic performance. Although gen-der differences in college academic performanceplay a larger role than gender differences ineducational transitions in explaining the femaleadvantage in college completion, gender-spe-cific differences in family background also con-tribute to the contemporary gender gap via theirimpact on educational transitions.

DISCUSSION

This article provides clear evidence of the trendtoward rising rates of female college completionover time in the United States. The gender gapin college enrollment and completion favoringmales has closed, so that in recent cohorts,females’ odds of college completion substan-tially exceed those for males. Our investigationof trend data shows that the white female advan-tage in college completion is largely attributa-ble to a declining rate of college completionamong boys whose fathers were high schooleducated or absent. This pattern is inconsistentwith either a gender-egalitarian or gender-rolesocialization argument. The gender-egalitarianhypothesis attributes the female-favorable trendin college completion to rising average levels ofparental education. We observed a pattern in linewith this argument for early cohorts, and wefound that the gender egalitarianism of college-educated parents was essentially stable acrossthe postwar decades. However, the trend impli-cations of the gender-egalitarian hypothesis failbecause of the declining likelihood of collegecompletion for males with absent or low-edu-cated fathers relative to similarly situatedfemales. Gender-role socialization perspectivespredict that compositional shifts in maternaleducation or employment rates could producefemale-favorable trends in higher education ifthese changes had a greater impact on daugh-ters than sons. Additionally, structural shiftsmay arise via a growing importance of mother’seducation for daughter’s educational attainment.The data do not provide strong support for either

conjecture. Instead, most of the shift stems froma different gender-distinctive pattern, namely,the growing vulnerability of boys in familieswith low-educated or absent fathers. These boyswere increasingly disadvantaged in education-al attainment.

Why would the probability of college com-pletion drop over time for sons in families witha high school–educated or absent father, evenas the probability rose for daughters in thesefamilies? Furthermore, why have daughterscontinued to surge ahead in their academicattainment and thereby push past boys almostregardless of family type? With respect to thelatter question, it is now clear that the proximatecause of the female overtaking is found in gen-der differences in behavior during 4-year col-lege. For white students, superior academicperformance in college rather than gender seg-regation by college type or major is the pri-mary cause of the female advantage in collegecompletion. The roots of the female advantagein academic performance, of course, lie muchearlier in the educational career. It should benoted that the consequences of the female per-formance advantage are relatively minor forhigh school completion or the transition to col-lege. Only after enrollment in 4-year college isthe female advantage in academic performanceconverted into a solid female advantage in edu-cational attainment.

For minority students, the story may be morecomplicated. The female advantage in collegeperformance appears to be weaker for nonwhitestudents than for white students, and otherunidentified factors may play a stronger role.Clearly, more research is needed to elucidate thesource of their advantage in college completion.

Our analyses imply that the male disadvan-tage in college completion originates in partfrom gender-distinctive effects of family back-ground. The data show that males, especiallyblack males, gain a differential advantage whenthey have a father in the home with some col-lege education, and that they lose this advantagewhen their father has only a high school edu-cation or is absent (Table 4). The GSS datamake it clear that this gender-distinctive patternemerged gradually during the postwar years.Explanations for why this pattern emerged aresuggested by our analyses, but cannot be sub-jected to a definitive test. For example, onepotential source of this trend that cannot be




tested with the available data is a cultural shiftin factors of family life that are linked to father’seducation. Back in 1940, a high school–edu-cated father was rather high in the educationalhierarchy of the American adult population, inwhich, according to the GSS data, fewer than 20percent of fathers had some college education.Many of these fathers were first- or second-generation immigrants who, by many accounts,had a strong mobility orientation for their chil-dren (Hirschman 1983). In contrast, highschool–educated fathers of the most recentcohorts are lower in the educational hierarchyand may differ in their mobility orientation fromtheir counterparts from the 1940s. It should benoted, however, that research on whether valuedifferences can explain differences in achieve-ment across racial and ethnic groups has typi-cally found at best a weak impact (Featherman1971; Kao and Thompson 2003; Rosen 1959).These research findings do not apply directly tothe current case, which concerns the extent towhich a particular level of parental educationhas a changing gender-specif ic impact onachievement in the next generation. However,they do point to the importance of consideringstructural factors as possible explanations for thetrend.

Another explanation for the growing femaleadvantage concerns gender-specific trends inacademic achievement. It clearly is the casethat girls generally outperform boys in school.But this is not a new phenomenon; it was in evi-dence at least back to the 1950s. What appearsto be new is the consequence of this superiorperformance for educational attainment. In ear-lier cohorts, boys went farther in school than didcomparably performing girls. In a sense, thisremained true in the NELS data. As seen earli-er in Table 7, the point estimate for the femalecoefficient in the model for college enrollmentwas negative after control variables were includ-ed in the model. However, it was not so nega-tive as to offset the female advantage inacademic performance and other social behav-iors (e.g., a lower tendency to get into fights).Consequently, the rates of enrollment in 4-yearcollege were roughly equivalent, and the femaleadvantage in academic performance combinedwith other factors to produce a female advan-tage in college completion. Why then has thischange been taking place?

We believe that the change stems from acombination of declining gender discrimina-tion and women’s growing interest in possess-ing autonomous resources by which they canpursue opportunities in both the labor and mar-riage markets while protecting themselvesagainst adversity in both realms. In previousresearch, we have shown that the total value ofcollege (including its value in the labor andmarriage markets) has risen faster for femalesthan for males (DiPrete and Buchmann 2006).Furthermore, a rising divorce rate into the early1980s coupled with greater postdivorce childcare responsibilities for women raised theimportance of college education as insuranceagainst falling below a middle-class standard ofliving more for women than for men.

It is unlikely that such a rationalist explana-tion would account for gender trends in testscores, which arise at an age when children arerelatively ignorant about labor or marriage mar-kets. However, the current study provides indi-rect support for the hypothesis that trends in thetotal value of college play a material role in theemergence of the new gender gap. Much of thefemale advantage in college completion comesfrom gender-specific behaviors of young adultsolder than 18 years of age. That these differencesin behavior occur in late adolescence and earlyadulthood is at least consistent with the argu-ment that they are being driven by calculationsabout the value of college for adult life. Thecombination of evidence that overt gender dis-crimination in American society has decreased,that the relative value of higher education forwomen has increased, and that females have along-standing advantage over males in aca-demic performance can explain the unexpect-ed reversal of a gender gap in collegecompletion that once favored males to one thatnow favors females.

The unexpected trend contains a certain irony.Although the value of a college education hasnot risen as fast for men as for women, DiPreteand Buchmann (2006) show that these returnshave indeed risen for men. The returns to edu-cation in the labor market have risen for men.The earnings value of a spouse to men has risenas female earnings have risen. Finally, the finan-cial vulnerability of men to divorce has risen(McManus and DiPrete 2001). Arguably, onepuzzling aspect of the reversal of the gender gapin college completion is the slow pace of growth





in men’s rates of college completion. Ourresearch suggests a socialization-based disad-vantage for males that is relatively stronger infamilies with low-educated or absent fathers.But whether this disadvantage plays out througha lack of knowledge about the value of post-secondary education and the way to convert itto success in the labor market, or through alower priority placed on education relative toother perhaps short-term goals, or through someother mechanism is not yet clear.

Recent statistics from the U.S. Department ofEducation (2004) indicate that the female-favor-able gender gap in higher education has con-tinued to widen in the 15 years since the NELSsample was at risk for enrolling in college.Currently, women are more likely than men toenroll in 4-year college, earn a bachelor’s degree,and enroll in graduate school. The fact that asimilar trend exists in many industrialized coun-tries suggests that there may be a common causefor the female-favorable trend in college com-pletion. Declining discrimination and growinggender egalitarianism may combine withwomen’s growing determination for education-al and labor market achievement throughoutthe industrialized world. The increasing avail-ability of internationally comparative data onintergenerational mobility for men and womenshould make it possible to establish whetherthe growing female advantage in other countrieshas been expressed via the same reversal inintergenerational association that we have foundin the United States. Future research also couldestablish whether the female advantage emergeslargely at the last educational transition, as in theUnited States, or whether females in other coun-tries have growing advantages over males atearlier educational transitions as well. Finally,a comparative approach makes possible a morerigorous assessment of the effects frommacrolevel factors, which may change at dif-ferent rates in different countries. The growingfemale advantage in college completion mayhave profound impacts on society that are onlybeginning to be appreciated. Both the causes andconsequences of this trend deserve greaterscrutiny.

Claudia Buchmann is Associate Professor ofSociology at the Ohio State University. Her researchinterests include social stratification, education, fam-ily dynamics, race and ethnicity, and comparativesociology. Her current research focuses on race,class, and gender inequalities in higher education inthe United States; institutional variations of educa-tional systems in industrialized societies and theirimpact on the formation of youths’educational aspi-rations; and cross-national variations in achieve-ment gaps between students of immigrant origin andnative born students. In previous research, she hasexamined processes related to educational stratifi-cation in developing societies and the consequencesof globalization and worldwide educational expan-sion for economic and social development.

Thomas A. DiPrete is Professor of Sociology and thecurrent chair of the sociology department atColumbia University. His research interests includesocial stratification, demography, economic sociol-ogy, and quantitative methodology. Current andrecent research projects include the comparativestructure of inequality and inequality trends inEuropean and American labor markets, the sourcesof variation and change in family structure in theUnited States and Europe, social polarization in theUnited States and its link with segregation in socialnetworks along several potential dimensions of socialcleavage, the development of strategies for estimat-ing causal effects in the presence of imperfectly spec-ified models, gender inequality in higher education,and teacher effects on educational outcomes.

APPENDIX AA. VVARIABLE DDEFINITIONSFOR GGSS AANALYSIS

College completion is assigned the value of 1 ifthe respondent completed at least 16 years ofeducation.

Age measures the respondent’s age in years.Father’s education and mother’s education

measure the father’s and mother’s years of edu-cation as reported by the respondent.

Father some college and mother some collegeare dichotomous variables that measure whethera respondent’s father or mother has 13 or moreyears of education.

Father present is assigned a value of 1 if thefather was present in the household when therespondent was 16 years of age.




AP

PE

ND

IX BB

.

Tab

le B

1.—

Var

iabl

e D

efin

itio

ns f

or N

EL

S A

naly

ses

Var

iabl

eD

efin

itio

n

Dep

ende

nt V

aria

bles

——

Eig

hth

grad

e G

PAG

PA c

alcu

late

d fr

om a

vera

ged-

repo

rted

gra

de f

or E

ngli

sh, M

ath,

Sci

ence

and

Soc

ial S

cien

ce in

8th

gra

de.

——

Top

quin

tile

of

high

sch

ool c

lass

Top

quin

tile

of

high

sch

ool c

lass

by

grad

e po

int a

vera

ge.

——

Post

-sec

onda

ry e

nrol

lmen

tE

nrol

led

in a

ny p

ost-

seco

ndar

y ed

ucat

ion

by 2

000.

——

Four

-yea

r co

lleg

e en

roll

men

tE

nrol

lmen

t in

any

4-ye

ar c

olle

ge a

s of

200

0.—

—C

olle

ge a

cade

mic

per

form

ance

Und

ergr

adua

te g

rade

poi

nt a

vera

ge.

——

Col

lege

com

plet

ion

Com

plet

ion

of b

ache

lor’s

deg

ree

or m

ore

as o

f 20

00.

Inde

pend

ent V

aria

bles

——

Fem

ale

Sex

of

resp

onde

nt.

——

Rac

eS

elf-

repo

rted

rac

e of

res

pond

ent:

whi

te, b

lack

or

othe

r.—

Hig

h sc

hool

aca

dem

ic p

erfo

rman

ce—

—H

igh

scho

ol c

lass

ran

kH

igh

scho

ol G

PA b

y qu

inti

le 1

= lo

w, 5

= h

igh.

——

Rea

ding

sco

reS

tand

ardi

zed

read

ing

com

preh

ensi

on a

nd a

bili

ty te

st s

core

in 1

2th

gra

de.

——

Mat

h sc

ore

Sta

ndar

dize

d pr

oble

m s

olvi

ng, s

impl

e an

d co

mpl

ex m

ath

abil

ity

test

sco

re in

12t

h gr

ade.

——

Sci

ence

sco

reS

tand

ardi

zed

basi

c, f

unda

men

tal a

nd c

ompl

ex s

cien

ce a

bili

ty te

st s

core

in 1

2th

grad

e.—

—S

ocia

l stu

dies

sco

reS

tand

ardi

zed

hist

ory,

cit

izen

ship

and

geo

grap

hy a

bili

ty te

st s

core

in 1

2th

grad

e.—

—A

vera

ge g

rade

in E

ngli

shA

vera

ge g

rade

in h

igh

scho

ol E

ngli

sh c

ours

es, s

tand

ardi

zed.

——

Ave

rage

gra

de in

mat

hA

vera

ge g

rade

in h

igh

scho

ol m

ath

cour

ses,

sta

ndar

dize

d.—

—A

vera

ge g

rade

in s

cien

ceA

vera

ge g

rade

in h

igh

scho

ol s

cien

ce c

ours

es, s

tand

ardi

zed.

——

Ave

rage

gra

de in

soc

ial s

tudi

esA

vera

ge g

rade

in h

igh

scho

ol s

ocia

l stu

dies

cou

rses

, sta

ndar

dize

d.—

Hig

h sc

hool

cur

ricu

lum

——

Eve

r in

AP

cou

rse

Eve

r en

roll

ed in

adv

ance

d pl

acem

ent c

ours

e.—

—A

cade

mic

inte

nsit

yA

com

posi

te m

easu

re o

f st

uden

ts’h

ighe

st le

vel o

f m

ath,

tota

l mat

h cr

edit

s, to

tal A

P c

ours

es, t

otal

Eng

lish

cre

dits

, tot

al f

orei

gn la

ngua

ge

cour

ses,

tota

l sci

ence

cre

dits

, tot

al c

ore

labo

rato

ry s

cien

ce c

redi

ts, t

otal

soc

ial s

cien

ce c

redi

ts, a

nd to

tal c

ompu

ter

scie

nce

cred

its.

For

m

ore

info

rmat

ion,

see

Ade

lman

, Dan

iel a

nd B

erko

vits

(20

03).

——

Rem

edia

l Eng

lish

Eve

r be

en in

a r

emed

ial E

ngli

sh c

lass

.—

—R

emed

ial m

ath

Eve

r be

en in

a r

emed

ial m

ath

clas

s.

(con

tinu

ed o

n ne

xt p

age)




Tab

le B

1.—

(Con

tinu

ed)

Var

iabl

eD

efin

itio

n

Inde

pend

ent V

aria

bles

—H

igh

scho

ol b

ehav

iors

——

Hom

ewor

kH

ours

spe

nt o

n ho

mew

ork

per

wee

k in

12t

h gr

ade.

——

Hou

rs o

f w

atch

ing

TV

Num

ber

of h

ours

of T

V w

atch

ed o

n w

eekd

ays

duri

ng s

choo

l yea

r in

12t

h gr

ade.

——

Hou

rs o

f w

orki

ngN

umbe

r of

hou

rs u

sual

ly w

orke

d ea

ch w

eek

duri

ng s

choo

l yea

r in

12t

h gr

ade.

——

No

wor

kD

id n

ot w

ork

duri

ng s

choo

l yea

r in

12t

h gr

ade.

——

Ski

p sc

hool

Freq

uenc

y of

ski

ppin

g sc

hool

in 1

2th

grad

e.—

—E

ver

in f

ight

Eve

r go

t int

o fi

ght i

n fi

rst s

emes

ter

of 1

2th

grad

e.—

—E

ver

in tr

oubl

eE

ver

got i

nto

trou

ble

in f

irst

sem

este

r of

12t

h gr

ade.

——

No

book

sFr

eque

ncy

of g

oing

to c

lass

wit

hout

boo

ks in

12t

h gr

ade.

——

No

penc

il/p

aper

Freq

uenc

y of

goi

ng to

cla

ss w

itho

ut p

enci

l/pa

per

in 1

2th

grad

e.—

Edu

cati

onal

exp

ecta

tion

sE

duca

tion

al E

xpec

tati

ons

in 1

2th

grad

e, 1

= n

ot f

inis

h hi

gh s

choo

l, 10

= P

hD o

r eq

uiva

lent

.—

Fam

ily b

ackg

roun

d—

—M

othe

r S

ome

Col

lege

Mot

her

has

som

e co

lleg

e ed

ucat

ion.

—

—Fa

ther

Som

e C

olle

geFa

ther

has

som

e co

lleg

e ed

ucat

ion.

——

Fath

er P

rese

ntFa

ther

pre

sent

in h

ouse

hold

in 8

th g

rade

.—

Col

lege

-lev

el in

dica

tors

——

Col

lege

maj

orM

ajor

of

firs

t deg

ree

or s

tart

ing

maj

or if

res

pond

ent r

ecei

ved

no c

olle

ge d

egre

e. C

ateg

orie

s in

clud

e: a

rts,

bas

ic s

kill

s, b

usin

ess,

com

pute

r-re

late

d, e

duca

tion

, eng

inee

ring

/arc

hite

ctur

e, g

ener

al s

tudi

es, h

ealt

h, h

uman

itie

s/so

cial

sci

ence

s, p

rote

ctiv

e se

rvic

es, s

cien

ce/m

ath,

trad

es,

othe

r.—

—C

olle

ge ty

peTy

pe o

f po

st-s

econ

dary

inst

itut

ion

atte

nded

: for

pro

fit p

ost-

seco

ndar

y, 2

-yea

r, 4-

year

pri

vate

, or

4-ye

ar p

ubli

c.—

—C

olle

ge s

elec

tivit

yS

elec

tivit

y le

vel o

f po

st-s

econ

dary

inst

itut

ion

atte

nded

: non

-sel

ectiv

e, s

elec

tive,

or

high

ly-s

elec

tive.

Not

e:G

PA =

gra

de p

oint

ave

rage

; AP

= a

dvan

ced

plac

emen

t; N

EL

S =

Nat

iona

l Edu

cati

onal

Lon

gitu

dina

l Sur

vey.



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