The Market for College Graduates and the Worldwide Boom in Higher Education of Women

Today, a larger fraction of women than men have completed higher education in 67 of 120 of the countries. In order to illuminate the worldwide boom in higher education, and in particular higher education of women, we present a model of the optimal investment in college by an individual. it appears that the average noncognitive abilities of women are higher than the average for men, as measured by average grades in school and standardized test scores, and that the inequality in noncognitive abilities is lower for women, as measured by the variances in these grades and test scores. Lower inequality of noncognitive abilities among women than men implies that elasticities of supply to college would be greater for women than men, since heterogeneity in costs of college attendance would be lower for women. Further, greater average noncognitive abilities of women than men implies that the supply of women to college would be greater than that of men when their benefits were the same. Together, these gender differences explain how the increased demand for college graduates that occurred in most countries during the past 30 years would have increased the supply of women by more than the supply of men, leading to women's college attendance surpassing that of men.