In contrast to trends everywhere else in the country, apparently women in Utah aren’t graduating from college at particularly impressive rates. According to a piece by Paul Nelson on Salt Lake City’s KSL-TV:
The percentage of women in Utah attending and graduating college has traditionally been high.
Dr. Susan Madsen, an associate professor of management at Utah Valley University says, “When you look back even to the 1940s and ‘50s and ‘60s and ‘70s, when you compare the percentage of females in Utah compared to the [national] population, we were actually above the national average.”
She says Utah tied the national average in 2001 and has since slipped below. …Utah has a smaller percentage of women who are graduating with degrees in business, science and math.
So apparently fewer Utah women are going to college. Or maybe fewer women are going to college and studying business, science and math. While the reasons for this shift are unclear, the situation in with women in Utah actually closely seems to mirror that of the United States as a whole.
It’s not really that fewer Utah women are going to college; it’s that the same amount is going as before. Meanwhile, more women in other states are flocking to universities.
Likewise, the U.S. used to be the world’s leader in the number of adults with postsecondary diplomas. Then other countries started to make sure more people went to college. While we still educate more people than ever before, now we’re falling behind relative to other countries. [Image via]
