WATERTOWN, Mass. — Women not only have overtaken men in their pursuit of bachelor’s degrees but have also eclipsed them in graduate and professional schools, new data show.
Women are earning 40% more doctoral degrees than men, and nearly twice as many master’s degrees, according to the U.S. Department of Education. And women now outnumber men in law, medical, pharmacy, veterinary, optometry and dental schools.
This is not some distant statistical abstraction. Americans can see this quiet but dramatic shift when they take their pets to the vet or their kids to the dentist, need a lawyer or an eye exam, see a therapist or pick up a prescription. In every case, they’re likely to see more, or only, women.
The main reason behind the increasingly entrenched trend: More women than men are earning the undergraduate degrees required to advance to graduate and professional school.
Women now account for about 60% of undergraduate enrollment. Nearly half of women age 25 to 34 have bachelor’s degrees, compared with 37% of men, according to the Pew Research Center.
“Women certainly still see education in terms of upward mobility,” said Lisa Greenhill, chief organizational health officer at the American Assn. of Veterinary Medical Colleges, whose job includes trying to diversify veterinary medicine at a time when four times more women than men are going to veterinary school. “Men have a lot more options. They feel like they don’t have to go to a four-year program or a graduate program.”
The number of men enrolled as undergraduates nationwide has dropped by nearly a quarter of a million, or 4%, just since 2020, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports. Men who do go to college, the Clearinghouse says, are 7 percentage points more likely than women to drop out.
“Men aren’t seeing higher education as valuable,” said Chevelle Newsome, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, which represents 460 universities. Many go into the trades or take other jobs straight out of high school to begin immediately earning a wage, forgoing the need to spend time in or money on college. Even men who do get undergraduate degrees may not see the value in continuing beyond them, Newsome said.
In the University of California system, new female undergraduates in the fall outnumbered new male undergraduates, 28,301 to 22,747. Women outnumbered men by more than 50,000 in the California State University system, making up 56% of the total student body, with 44% male enrollment last year.
What the numbers look like
The number of women earning law degrees passed the number of men in 2019, figures from the American Bar Assn. show. By 2020, the bar association said, the majority of general lawyers working for the federal government were women, and by 2023, the majority of associates at law firms were women.
In medical schools, the number of women also overtook the number of men in 2019. Today, 55% of future doctors are women, up from 48% in 2015, according to the Assn. of American Medical Colleges.
Women already make up significantly larger proportions of residents in specialties including endocrinology, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, family medicine and psychiatry.
Women also outnumber men 3 to 1 in doctoral programs in psychology and nearly 4 to 1 in master’s programs, the American Psychological Assn. reports. They make up 55% of graduates of dental schools and 72% in pediatric dentistry, according to the American Dental Assn.
More than 7 out of 10 students in schools of optometry are women, the Assn. of Schools and Colleges of Optometry says. And at pharmacy schools, women constitute two-thirds of students working toward master’s degrees and 56% of those seeking doctorates, statistics from the American Assn. of Colleges of Pharmacy show.
There are still more men than women in doctoral and master’s degree programs in business, engineering, math and the physical sciences. But women make up substantial majorities of graduate enrollment in health sciences, public administration, education, social and behavioral sciences and biological and agricultural sciences, according to the Council of Graduate Schools.
Why universities are concerned
While the numbers show progress for women in prestigious fields, the declining number of men enrolling in graduate programs is bad news for the universities and colleges that offer them — and for the economy.
That’s because the growing number of women going to graduate and professional schools can’t continue forever to outpace the decline in the number of men to sustain higher education institutions. Total graduate enrollment at private, nonprofit colleges and universities was already down this fall, the Clearinghouse reports.
The decline comes as graduate degrees have become a crucial revenue source for universities, which take in about $20 billion a year from master’s programs alone, a separate analysis by the right-leaning think tank the American Enterprise Institute calculates.
Enrollment problems have been made worse by visa restrictions and cuts to federal research funding, which have helped reduce the number of international students coming to the United States for graduate study by 12%, according to the Institute of International Education.
Universities are also facing other new threats to their graduate programs, including impending federal borrowing limits for graduate study and a public backlash against the high cost and uneven returns of graduate degrees.
New federal loan limits scheduled to take effect next year are widely expected to further eat into graduate school enrollment. The changes will cap borrowing at $100,000 for graduate students and $200,000 for those in professional programs. That’s much less than the approximately $408,150 it costs to get a medical degree from a private, nonprofit university or the $297,745 from a public one, the association of medical colleges said. The group projects a national shortage of as many as 124,000 physicians by 2034.
Rising costs
The price of a graduate degree has more than tripled since 2000, according to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
Students of all genders are increasingly questioning the return on that investment. Nearly 40% of prospective graduate students say graduate programs that cost more than $10,000 a year are too expensive, the consulting firm EAB found. Payoffs vary widely, making some graduate degrees “a potentially high-risk investment,” the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce has concluded.
Overall, the U.S.’ ranking in the proportion of Americans 25 and older with master’s degrees or higher has fallen since 2000, from first in the world to 24th, according to the World Bank, and its ranking for the percentage of those with doctoral degrees has dropped during that period from first to seventh.
“That is a huge concern, when you think about where economies are going,” said Claudia Buchmann, an Ohio State University sociologist who studies gender issues and is co-author of the book “The Rise of Women.” “If we’re trying to compete on a global level, the fact that men’s college-going rates are so stagnant means we can’t fix this problem until we get more men.”
Men are, after all, half the nation’s labor force. And while some graduate degrees may not pay off, many of them do, substantially. People with advanced degrees are also much less likely to be unemployed.
“When you think about global economic competitiveness for the United States — despite the skepticism that’s out there — education and training are still the keys to good jobs,” Buchmann said. Falling behind by that measure “is doing damage to men in this country.”
Officials from associations of graduate and professional schools who are trying to recruit more men said the gender shift can be self-perpetuating. Men may be put off by what they see as the “feminization” of professions in which they now are the minority, research by the veterinary medical colleges association concluded.
“I’m not seeing a national effort to say we need to change this,” Buchmann said. “If anything, the opposite is true.”
Graduate school leaders say the most effective efforts to reverse the trend are at the undergraduate level.
“A lot of the effort from the graduate community has been to reach down and support those projects,” said Newsome, who was formerly the dean of graduate studies at Sacramento State. Universities also are encouraging employers to sponsor graduate education for male employees, she said.
Marcus writes for the Hechinger Report, which produced this story and is a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
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