Among 1992–93 bachelor’s degree recipients, women differed from men on a number of characteristics, including age, marital and parenthood status, undergraduate major, grade-point average (GPA), and educational aspirations. Compared with men, women were more likely to be under age 23 (51 percent vs. 42 percent) or over age 29 (19 percent vs. 13 percent). They were also more likely than men to have married (29 percent vs. 24 percent) and to have children (16 percent vs. 12 percent) by the time they graduated.

With respect to their undergraduate experiences, women were more likely than men to major in certain fields, most notably education (18 percent vs. 6 percent) and health professions (10 percent vs. 4 percent). Men, in contrast, were more likely than women to major in business and management (26 percent vs. 19 percent) and engineering (12 percent vs. 2 percent). Women graduated with higher GPAs than men: 61 percent of women had GPAs of 3.0 or higher, compared with 49 percent of men.

Finally, at the time they earned their bachelor’s degree, women were more likely than men to expect to earn a graduate degree (87 percent vs. 83 percent). Marital status as well as gender was related to educational plans, with single¹ women being more likely to expect to earn a graduate degree (89 percent) than married women (83 percent) and both married and single men (82 percent and 84 percent, respectively). Among those expecting to earn a graduate degree, married women were less likely than single women and both married and single men to expect to earn a first-professional or doctoral degree.