Father Involvement and the Gender Gap in Education

A new column by Christopher Brown in The Huffington Post reveals how a new gender gap has started in higher education. Brown points out that women are enrolling in and graduating from college at much higher rates than men. In this post, get details on the issue so you can help encourage dads around you.

Brown writes in How dads' Involvement Can Address the Gender Gap in Higher Education, which I recommend you read in full, but some insights you should know are as follows:

• In 1994, the proportion of female and male high school graduates who enrolled in college was virtually the same (63 percent and 61 percent, respectively). By 2012, a sizable gap had emerged with 71 percent of female high school graduates enrolled in college compared to 61 percent of males.
• The gap doesn't discriminate based on race or ethnicity.
• Women now represent nearly three-fifths of graduate students.
• While we should celebrate that more women attend college and obtain degrees than ever before, we should be concerned that men are being left behind and that extremely little is being done about it.
• This trend has dire economic and social consequences.
• Men who don't graduate from college earn less money, for example, than men who do. It also makes them more vulnerable to unemployment, which has a host of consequences that include a higher risk for criminal behavior.

What can we do to address this gender gap?

• Greater father involvement in the lives of high school students.
• Father absence is at the heart of the educational challenges faced by boys and men.
• Boys are more likely to drop out of high school, for example, when they grow up without their dads. (Accordingly, My Brother's Keeper acknowledges this fact.)

Brown mentions a recent study on the impact of father involvement on college graduation rates and says it reveals why "greater father involvement is vital to addressing the gender gap specifically and increasing college graduation rates generally because, quite frankly, we should also be concerned that only 1 of 3 young adults, regardless of gender, graduates from college."

Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia studied children ages 7-12 by dividing teens into four groups based on their fathers' level of involvement:

1. not involved
2. less involved
3. involved
4. very involved

Wilcox findings were as follows:

• regardless of socioeconomic status and compared to teens of not involved dads, teens with involved dads were 98 percent more likely to graduate from college while teens with very involved fathers were 105 percent more likely to graduate from college.

Brown summarizes:

more involved fathers contribute to more college success for our nation's young adults and is a much more cost-effective solution than hundreds of programs and initiatives that, while laudable and part of the solution, don't go far enough upstream and cost a ton of money.

Wilcox and Brown make it clear that while the dads in the home are more involved than ever; sadly, more children are growing up without dad in the home. Fixing this education gap means understanding and working to fix the father absence problem.

Read the full article at The Huffington Post.