<p>What really struck me was how few female college grads there were in 1970 and 1980. My three sisters and most of the women I knew went to college, but I'm sure that was related to socio-economic factors.</p>
<p>And I don't want to start any debate. Please. But I do think the Asian column is interesting, especially how it evolves over time. I'll leave it at that.</p>
<p>Oh, and I hope I'm not recycling this from some earlier thread. I was cleaning up my favorites and found it in there.</p>
<p>These are data for people age 25 and older at the times when the data are collected.</p>
<p>So the graduation rate data collected in 1970 and 1980 do not reflect the trends in college attendance at those times. They primarily reflect the trends in prior decades.</p>
<p>That said, I do remember that when I graduated from high school in 1972, there were kids in the top 10 percent of my class, in a fairly affluent Connecticut suburb, who did not go on to college for one reason or another (and those reasons were not necessarily financial). Nowadays, that would be almost unthinkable.</p>
<p>Well, even in around 1970, there were still differences in the ways that some people viewed education for men and women.</p>
<p>I remember that in 1971, my mother, a divorced woman, married a man who had three sons and a daughter from his previous marriage. Money was limited, and he and his first wife had decided that they would contribute, to the best of their ability, to the educational expenses of any of their sons who wanted to go to college but that they would not do the same thing for their daughter because she would get less value out of the education.</p>
<p>My first question, after my mother married this guy, was whether his views on education for women would apply to my sister and me. We had always expected that we would go to college, and nobody had ever suggested that our gender should in any way limit our opportunities. My mother immediately assured me that nothing had changed for us. I felt bad for my new stepsister, though.</p>
<p>Marian, when my parents divorced in 1968, it was in the custody/child support judgment that my Dad would be required to pay child support for me until age 18, but he was required to pay child support for my brothers until they reached the age of 21! I think the implication of that was that my brothers would want/need to go to college, and I would just need to get married or become a secretary. :mad:</p>
<p>U.S. Dept. of Education. (It’s not an odd number when you think about it - from returning Veterans to folks going back to school, the massive expansion in community colleges serving adult “back-to-school” students and retraining funds, and the explosion of “for-profit” colleges - by far the largest university in the U.S. is the University of Phoenix.)</p>
<p>An acquaintance of mine had twin girls who graduated from high school in2010. I heard him say that he would only pay for state school educations for them because they would just get married anyway. Some things have not changed.</p>
<p>When we graduated from HS back in the 70s, at our upper middle class HS, nearly 90% or more of the kids went to flagship U or some other U. When H graduated from HS over a decade prior, his class also had nearly all the class go on to flagship U or some other U as well.</p>
<p>NOW, that same HS I graduated from only sends a much smaller proportion (I believe less than 1/2) of their graduates to any U. Really sad to me. Plus, the library stopped buying ANY materials or books after I graduated in 1975! They recently got alums & folks to donate so they could have materials in the library & threw all the insect-riddled old materials away.</p>
<p>The rise in high school graduation attainment is also interesting.</p>
<p>[Table</a> 231](<a href=“http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0231.pdf]Table”>http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0231.pdf) indicates that non-completion of high school rates fell to about 10-11% for the generation up to age 64 in 2010 (so born 1946 or later), but were higher in previous generations. Bachelor’s degree completion rates have been rising for each generation, although advanced degree completion rates have actually been declining, so bachelor’s degree + advanced degree completion rates have not actually been rising.</p>
<p>It depends on your point of view. A woman with a bachelor’s degree earns, on average, less than a man with a bachelor’s degree. But she earns considerably more than a woman who did not go to college. From her point of view, there is considerable economic value in a college education.</p>