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Analysis of March Current Population Survey data from 1964 through 2002 shows that while women overtook white men in their rates of college completion and that this phenomenon occurred during a period in which women's standard-of-living gains from college completion grew at a faster rate than those for men. We assess whether these trends are related to changes in the value of education for men and women in terms of earnings returns to higher education, the probability of getting and staying married, education-related differences in family standard of living, and insurance against living in poverty. Although returns to a college education in the form of earnings remained higher for women than for men over the entire period, trends in these returns do not provide a plausible explanation for gender-specific trends in college completion. But when broader measures of material well-being are taken into account, women's returns to higher education appear to have risen faster than those of men.
Recent evidence suggests that females have made substantial gains in all realms of education and now generally outperform males on several key educational benchmarks. According to a recent study commissioned by the U.S. Congress, "in school and in college, females are now doing as well as or better than males on many of the indicators of educational attainment, and the large gaps in educational attainment that once existed between men and women have in most cases been eliminated" (Bae et al. 2000:2; emphasis added). In 1970, the majority of college students were men (58%), but by 2000, 56% of all college students were women (Freeman 2004:70). Today, women are also more likely than men to persist in college, obtain degrees, and enroll in graduate school (Bae et al. 2000:7-8). Although this trend toward female advantage in higher education has attracted the attention of college administrators, policymakers, and the media (e.g., Conlin 2003; Fonda and Berryman 2000; Gose 1999; Thompson 2003), existing empirical studies do not provide a sufficient explanation for this trend.
Some efforts to date have focused on the impact of trends in parental resources on the female-favorable trend in higher education. Buchmann and DiPrete (2005) found that in the first decades following the Great Depression, a form of "educational egalitarianism" influenced the educational gender...