A plethora of research findings indicate that the gender gap in college performance today—favoring females in terms of enrollment in a four-year college and completion of a bachelor’s degree—appears as early as elementary school, with some variation in timing based on race/ethnicity and family income. A new report pins the timing down to no later than third grade and shows that the race and income introduce less variation than previously thought.
Researchers Dan Goldhaber and Stephanie Liddle from the University of Washington use data from The Evergreen State to examine the relationship between third-grade test performance—the earliest such data available—and students’ college outcomes. They start with more than 506,000 public school students who entered third grade between 2006 and 2012, including demographic characteristics, family income, and third-grade test scores in math and English language arts. They follow all students through one year after high school graduation and members of the first four cohorts through four years after high school graduation.
First up: They find that males and females are not evenly distributed among the performance deciles on third grade tests, with females overrepresented in the top five deciles, and males overrepresented in the lower five deciles. Black and Hispanic students are heavily overrepresented in the lower deciles regardless of gender—roughly 70 percent scoring in the bottom half of the distribution—of which 53 percent are Black or Hispanic males. By contrast, 62 percent of Asian students score in the top half of the distribution, comprising 47 percent males.
Using a multinomial logistic regression model, they examine college enrollment patterns, focusing on test deciles and gender. Overall, students in the lowest decile of third-grade achievement had a 6 percent chance of attending a four-year college while those in the highest decile had a 49 percent chance. So far, so logical. But at every decile, they also find a gap in four-year college enrollment clearly favoring women over men—by an average of 7 percentage points. This makes less intuitive sense, but is consistent with previous research. Put another way, males in all deciles except the highest had roughly the same chance of enrolling in a four-year college as females who performed two deciles below them in third grade. Low-income students of both genders were less likely to enroll in four-year colleges than their higher-income peers, but the female/male enrollment gap above was generally consistent within various income groups. Two-year college enrollment, interestingly, did not show the same gender gaps.
Goldhaber and Liddle confine their college completion analyses to a subset of students (136,710) who enrolled in either a two-year or four-year college the first year after high school and could be observed through four years after high school graduation. Overall, 67 percent of students who enrolled in a two-year college after high school were not observed completing an associate or a bachelor’s degree within four years, and 44 percent of students who enrolled in a four-year college after high school were not observed completing either degree. Women made up 54 percent of all degree completers. There was minimal gender difference in the likelihood of completing a two-year degree, consistent with the two-year college enrollment findings. Conversely, women’s probability of completing a bachelor’s degree outstripped men’s by 3 to 12 percentage points across every third-grade-performance decile. Notably, the average gender gap in bachelor’s degree completion is even larger (by 2.1 percentage points) than the gender gap in four-year college enrollment. In every racial and ethnic category, women were also more likely to complete a four-year degree than men—also in the 3 to 12 percentage points range—but the comparison between lower- and higher-income students reveals gender gaps ranging from 5 to 30 percentage points in favor of women, depending on third-grade-performance decile.
The report is quick to point out that these are not causal findings. Third grade test scores in math and English provide only a limited view of academic ability, just as four-year graduation from college is not the norm for many degree-earners. Moreover, the individual educational experiences for students between third grade and college, including possible out-of-school academic supports, are a black box in this research design. However, thousands of these students attended the same Washington schools with the same teachers and the same resources available. Thus the authors portray their findings as “early indicators” of future postsecondary outcomes, especially for boys. Whatever mix of influences determine the likelihood of college enrollment and completion is already in motion as of third grade, and these data show that boys of all races and ethnicities are particularly at risk of getting locked into low performance from an early age. And while there are clear reasons why high school boys would be less likely to go to college than their female peers, there are also societal reasons for wanting to close those college-going and college-completion gender gaps. Educators, policymakers, parents, and other stakeholders who value the latter will have to both boost the early achievement of young boys and convince more of them to go to college after high school.
SOURCE: Dan Goldhaber and Stephanie Liddle, “Gender, Ethnoracial, and Economic Differences in the Predictive Power of Early-Grade Test Scores on College Enrollment and Degree Completion,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (May 2026).
