In today’s job market, students are told from the time they are young that the way for them to get ahead in the world is to go to college. Obviously, many students are listening because college enrollment has been rising steadily. However, women’s enrollment especially continues to rise, and now easily outnumber men on most college campuses. This is because societal expectations of males and females drive them to make decisions such as this to better their future. Fig. 1 shows that women’s enrollment is almost two times greater than it was in 1980. A close to 50% jump in less than 25 years is a surprising number.
If all students are being told to go to college, then why are women’s numbers higher than men’s? In The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools by Thomas A. DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann, they argue that boys participate less in activities
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It is well documented that there is a clear wage gap between men and women in the US. In a recent study, 9,000 men and women were interviewed on this subject. The study was the focus of a Fortune article. The author describes the issue, “It turns out that persistent wage gaps in the labor market play a big part in motivating women to finish school. In the short term, men who drop out face no financial penalty in their entry-level salaries. Women, on the other hand, pay a steep price right away for dropping out, since female dropouts earn entry-level pay that averages $6,500 a year lower than what their male counterparts earn.” Yet, the wage gap even spans to college graduates. Fig. 2 shows that male college graduates with a bachelor’s degree still make close to 35% more than females with the same degree. Women in today’s society are chasing the wage gap, and believe that they must get ahead as much as they can with a good