Stability and change in the academic qualifications of recent men and women college entrants

In the span of only a few generations, women have made great strides in higher education, and now far outpace men in college enrollment and completion. Especially given that girls tend to have higher achievement across levels of education, some scholars and commentators have begun to raise questions about which men and women, in terms of academic qualifications, attend colleges in the U.S.—particularly elite colleges that are associated with the greatest economic and social returns. We assess these questions using data from the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 (ELS-02) and the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 (HSLS-09), two nationally representative datasets collected during this recent era of heightened college competitiveness. We find that men and women had roughly equal chances of attending top colleges given equal academic qualifications. Importantly, though, we observe large changes at the bottom of the academic hierarchy, with less-prepared men increasingly opting into two-year colleges and attending higher education at similar rates as comparably qualified women. Thus, while much commentary tends to focus on elite institutions, recent changes at non-elite institutions are much more consequential for broader educational trends. Implications for research on gender and educational inequality are discussed.