What accounts for the increase in college attainment of women?

Abstract

The objective of this article is to explain the reduction in the US sex college attainment ratio (SCAR) from 1.57 to 1.19. over the last decades. We use a model where altruistic parents make decisions on daughters and sons' education taking into account the effect of education on earnings, marriage opportunities, fertility and home production. The main finding is that observed changes in earnings and fertility explain part of the decrease in the SCAR, while observed changes in marital status and marital sorting imply a decrease in college attainment of women.

Notes

¹ See for example Krussell et al. (2000).

² See for example McGrattan and Rogerson (1998).

³ We use the 1993 Individuals File from the PSID, that have additional information on births to individuals.

⁴ Also reported in Caucutt et al. (2002).

⁵ It increased 19% for college educated womenn and 12% for high educated women and and it decreased 40% for dropouts.

⁶ Consistency requires that the two transition matrices across marital status yield that the number of males in education group married to females in education group is equal to the number of females in education group married to males in education group . Unfortunately, this is not likely to be the case because of sampling error in the data, and because the distribution of education in the data is not stationary (so estimates of marriage transitions need not be consistent). To deal with this issue, we take the educational distribution for males and females from the data as well as the transitions for females. We then adjust when required the transition of males so that the consistency requirement is satisfied.

⁷ They find that the simplest theory that parents prefer boys over girls is not able to properly account for the SCAR. Relaxing the income pooling assumption that is made in the base model is neither able to account for the SCAR.