Americans Think Women Need College More Than Men Do

Article here. Excerpt:

'According to Reuters, the Pew Research Center talked to over 2,000 Americans and found that while 77% said women needed to go to college, just 68% said men needed to. Also, women tended to be more positive about their college experiences — female graduates were more likely than male ones to say that their education was worth the money, and that college contributed to their personal and intellectual growth. Another interesting finding: 40% of women's parents paid for college, while just 29% of men's did so.
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Whatever the case, there's the potential for a feedback loop here: if people continue to see college as more necessary for women than for men, more women may enroll and more men may opt out, making universities seem more female and thus less necessary for men, and then starting the whole process over again. It seems unlikely that women will ever take over the entirety of the intellectual labor force, or that any other dire mancessionary scenarios will come to pass, but a perception that guys don't need college is none too good for young men. And a widening gender gap in enrollment without a corresponding closure of the wage gap might lead to more debt for women — or, even more troublingly, a loss of respect for colleges if they start to become female-dominated institutions in a world where femaleness is still devalued. Really, large gender inequalities in college enrollment are unlikely to be beneficial for people of any gender, and when it comes to making decisions about college, one's chromosomes probably aren't very important. Now researchers need to figure out why people think they are.'