The Education Gadfly Weekly

Ohio’s new state budget impacts many areas of K-12 education, including career-connected learning? By our reckoning, their efforts resulted in one important win but also three missed opportunities.

Career-connected learning has been a hot topic in Ohio for years. Policymakers have established a variety of initiatives aimed at providing more and better opportunities for kids. The number of industry-recognized credentials (IRCs) earned by students has skyrocketed. And lawmakers invested hundreds of millions in state funds to strengthen and expand access to career-technical education (CTE).

These developments hold promise for both Ohio students and employers. But now is not the time for state leaders to rest on their laurels. There are plenty of problems still to address, and this year’s state budget process offered a prime opportunity to do so. Did lawmakers capitalize on that opportunity? Yes and no. Let’s take a look at where they landed in four major areas—resulting in one win and three missed opportunities.

The win

Offering pathways to in-demand credentials

Ohio leaders have invested considerable amounts of state funding and political capital into promoting industry-recognized credentials (IRCs) and incorporating them into graduation requirements. As a result of their efforts, more students are earning IRCs than ever before. But a closer look at the data reveals that many of these credentials don’t take much time or effort to earn and lead to industries and jobs that pay relatively low wages. This means that thousands of students are spending time and effort to earn credentials that won’t benefit them in the long run.

State policy is partially to blame. Under state law, IRCs that can be used to qualify for high school graduation are assigned a point value between one and twelve by a state-level committee. But this point value system doesn’t effectively identify credential value or encourage students to earn IRCs that lead to better long-term outcomes.

Thanks to the budget, that should change. Governor DeWine’s proposal to eliminate the point value system and require the IRC committee to establish new criteria under which a student may use IRCs to earn a diploma was included in the final budget. Hopefully, the committee will choose to link credentials to student-focused outcomes like job outlook, associated wages, and industry value.

Three missed opportunities

Preparing students to make informed decisions about their futures

Current law requires every Ohio student in grades nine through twelve who attends a public or chartered non-public school to have a graduation plan that maps their academic pathway to a diploma. These plans consider course and graduation requirements but do not require students to think beyond high school or consider potential careers. As a result, thousands of students graduate each year with no idea how to pursue their interests or even what they’re interested in.

When Governor DeWine released his budget recommendations this February, he included a requirement for student plans to identify post-graduation career goals and align students’ high school experiences to those goals. This would have been a big step forward for Ohio kids. Unfortunately, the governor’s proposal wasn’t included in the final budget. That means, for now, too many students will leave high school without a solid plan for the future.

Supporting career exploration and awareness

Starting in 2021, lawmakers began to allocate funding to schools to support career awareness and exploration opportunities for students. During fiscal year 2024, the state set aside $12.3 million and schools were awarded $7.50 per student. For fiscal year 2025, the state set aside $16.3 million and schools’ per-pupil amount rose to $10. The recently passed budget, however, took a buzzsaw to these funds and limited the allocation to just $5 million for each fiscal year, a sizable cut relative to current amounts.

This was a mistake for two reasons. First, career awareness and exploration funds are Ohio’s only dedicated state-level investment in general career readiness for students of all ages. Most Ohio students depend on schools to provide exploration opportunities like career fairs, field trips, and job shadowing that can help them decide which pathways to pursue after graduation. Without a dedicated funding stream to cover costs, it’s unlikely schools will prioritize providing these opportunities, and students will pay the price.

 Second, the final bill eliminated waivers that have exempted districts from the requirement to offer CTE to all seventh and eighth graders. This was a wise move, as every middle schooler deserves to have access to CTE. But by slashing funds that would have helped schools provide exploration opportunities, lawmakers have increased the likelihood of ineffective implementation.

Tracking workforce outcomes

One of the best ways to ensure that students can smoothly transition between high school, postsecondary education, and the workforce is to ensure that leaders in those sectors are working together to solve problems and implement solutions. Right now, state agencies—including the Department of Education and Workforce, the Department of Higher Education, the Department of Job and Family Services, and the Governor’s Office of Workforce Transformation—separately collect and analyze a mountain of data on workforce outcomes. But linking these data in a way that effectively drives policy is difficult. And for key stakeholders in Ohio, the sheer number of reports and tools being published can be overwhelming enough that they lose their value.

The Senate tackled this problem by proposing to establish an Education and Workforce Data Insights Board that would have made the state’s education and workforce data more applicable and beneficial by supporting data-driven policymaking and helping stakeholders understand the return on investment of various career pathways. Unfortunately, the board didn’t make the cut for the final budget. The state’s current data efforts are still in place, which is good news. But going forward, lawmakers should consider how to streamline state agencies’ work.

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Career-connected learning doesn’t grab headlines as easily as issues like school funding and school choice. But preparing students for the future is crucial, and the failure of state leaders to strengthen policy in this important field is disappointing. To their credit, lawmakers did make some important changes, like an overhaul of the IRC framework. But other policies, like career planning, funding for exploration opportunities, and a research and data transparency initiative were left on the cutting room floor. Over the next few months, lawmakers should reconsider their importance and pick them back up.

Update (7/1/25): Of the items discussed here, Governor DeWine vetoed the nonchartered private school ESA and several property tax proposals.

Author’s note (6/30/25): As of the posting of this piece, Governor DeWine had not yet weighed in with any vetoes. Any relevant vetoes will be noted in an update at the top of this piece.

Last week, Ohio lawmakers put finishing touches on the biennial state budget for FY26 and FY27. As usual, education issues were front and center. This iteration, lawmakers focused much of their attention on fiscal-related matters, most notably the school funding formula (which distributes state aid to districts and charter schools), as well as local property taxes, which provide billions more for school districts.

In the end, lawmakers crafted a rather fiscally conservative budget, including a sizeable income tax cut and reforms that help address concerns about rising local property taxes. Increases in state spending overall, and in K–12 education specifically, were relatively modest. This piece offers takeaways, largely focusing on funding issues (future posts will dive into other education policy areas).

1. Public school funding ticks upward, but with some significant belt tightening

The last state budget featured hefty increases in public school funding, both for traditional districts and charter schools, as well as additional funding to support private-school choice. While this budget didn’t ratchet back funding—contrary to the left-leaning media narrative—growth in state funding for K–12 education slowed this time around. Overall public school funding is projected to increase by 4 percent over the biennium (compared to just over 10 percent in the previous budget). Despite substantial enrollment declines in recent years, traditional districts receive more state aid, as their funding goes up 2.4 percent from FY25 to FY27. The faster-growing charter and JVSD (career-tech) sectors receive larger increases of 10.1 and 14.0 percent, respectively (in real dollars, not on a per-pupil basis).

Table 1: State foundation funding for public schools, FY25 (current) to FY27 (projected)

2. Lawmakers put the school funding formula on a more sustainable track

In 2021, Ohio lawmakers enacted the politically popular but very expensive Cupp-Patterson school funding formula. With state coffers overflowing during the first years of implementation, lawmakers were able to sign-off on its exorbitant expense. But with the Covid era of fiscal largesse ending, lawmakers began to question the model’s sustainability. After much back and forth, the budget bill generally keeps in place the formula and fully phases it in yet also takes important steps to improve its functioning and sustainability. Here’s how:

• Reasserts legislative control over formula costs: The General Assembly has the power of the purse, i.e., the ability to maintain control over appropriations, a large one of which is school funding. The Cupp-Patterson plan erodes that authority through a structure that prescribes formula amounts based on “inputs” that are outside the realm of legislative control (e.g., teacher salaries dependent on local decision making). Despite strong lobbying efforts from school groups to “update the inputs”—a move with a hefty price tag—the legislature decided to hold the inputs constant, opting instead to provide small per-pupil supplement of $27 and $40 per pupil to all public schools statewide in FY26 and FY27, respectively. This decision constrains formula costs and signals a more assertive legislative role moving forward in determining the rate of funding growth.

• Begins an overhaul of disadvantaged pupil impact aid (DPIA): The legislature wisely approved a Senate proposal to phase in an improved method of identifying low-income students (direct certification) to allocate supplemental funds supporting their education. Incorporating these more accurate data will improve DPIA allocations. However, the work is still unfinished. Future lawmakers will need to fully phase in direct-certification numbers and increase the DPIA base per-pupil amount to ensure the element works as intended and low-income students receive the resources they need for success.

• Takes baby steps toward sunsetting “guarantees”: Guarantees are subsidies that shield districts from funding reductions that would otherwise occur if the formula were strictly followed. In practice, the persistent use of guarantees means that Ohio funds a number of “phantom students” or “empty desks,” as guarantees prop up districts that lose enrollment (they also send excess aid to districts that are growing wealthier). After much debate, the legislature did two smallish things in this area: (1) repealed a relatively modest ($53 million/year) guarantee-like component known as supplemental targeted assistance and (2) held steady the system’s main guarantees’ “base” years, which are currently FY20 and FY21. As discussed here, maintaining a longer “lookback” helps phase out guarantees faster than updating the baseline to a more recent year, as some had proposed in the budget process. While not nearly as aggressive as they should have been, lawmakers did push the issue to the forefront of the debate and took some measures to unwind guarantees.

3. The push for equitable charter funding loses steam

After a promising start in the governor’s budget, the final bill landed with a surprising thud for charter schools. While state funding for charters will rise modestly in the next biennium, in both absolute dollars and per-pupil, it will be due to the increases in their general formula aid (table 1), not via greater investment in key supplemental elements that are crucial to closing the charter funding gap. As of FY24, high-performing charters receive about 10 percent less total funding per-pupil than their local districts; other charters receive about 30 percent less.

The following describes where the legislature came out on three charter-specific components:

• High-quality charter funding: Maintains current per-pupil funding amounts ($3,000 per economically disadvantaged pupil, $2,250 per non-disadvantaged). The budget bill, in general, upholds a high performance bar to qualify but slightly modifies the criteria in ways that will allow some more schools to become eligible. The per-pupil amounts are subject to reductions to fit the line-item appropriation, should more schools qualify for the program than expected.

• Charter facilities allowance: This program will be flat-funded at $1,000 per pupil. It was incredibly disappointing to see the legislature scale back the governor’s proposed increase to $1,500 per pupil, a boost that would have helped charters cover more of their building expenses.

• Charter equity supplement: In another disappointment, lawmakers cut funding for this program. Instead of $650 per pupil equity supplement as of FY25, charters will receive just $500 and $400 per pupil in FY26 and FY27.

Taken together, the dialing back of these elements means that the average charter funding gap won’t budge very much. Regrettably, charter students, by virtue of their choice in school, will continue to get the short end of the funding stick.

4. A mix of steps forward, steps backward on other funding-related issues

Here’s how the legislature landed on funding several other notable programs and initiatives:

• Private school scholarships: Legislators flat-funded the EdChoice and Cleveland scholarship amounts, which are tied to the average base-per-pupil funding for public schools. Since the base doesn’t go up, those scholarship amounts remain unchanged. The legislature, however, did increase the Autism and Jon Peterson special-needs scholarships by roughly 5 percent.

• Nonchartered, nonpublic school ESA: At the cost of an estimated $35 million per year, lawmakers created an educational savings account (ESA) program for parents with children attending “nonchartered” private schools, which cannot accept EdChoice scholarships because they choose not to be “chartered” by the state. The ESAs will be worth 75 percent of the EdChoice amount, and homeschoolers are ineligible for an ESA (though their parents can receive a state tax credit). There are many details in the budget bill about how the ESA is supposed to work—it does include, for instance, a testing and reporting requirement—and it will be interesting to track program implementation in the years ahead.

• Literacy coaches: The governor proposed a $12 million per year earmark for coaches that support schools implementing the Science of Reading. To their credit, lawmakers signed off on the request, and the state will continue to support literacy coaches who work in the state’s lowest-performing schools.

• Industry recognized credentials: The governor proposed $16 million per year for the Innovative Workforce Incentive Program (IWIP), which provides schools reimbursements when students earn a high-priority, in-demand industry credential. The legislature wisely approved that funding amount. Also in the area of credentials, the legislature followed the governor’s lead by repealing a $5.5 million per year test-fee reimbursement program that applied to any credential, many of which are of minimal value to students and employers.

• Career awareness and exploration funds: Currently, $16 million per year is allocated to support career exploration opportunities across grades K–12 such as job shadowing, career counseling, or a job exploration course. The governor proposed to maintain that funding level, but the legislature scaled back that amount to just $5 million per year. That reduction will unfortunately make strong career-connecting learning less common in Ohio.

• Property taxes: In response to citizen concerns about recent tax hikes, the legislature responded with a package of reforms aimed at taming property taxes. In general, while these reforms may not give most Ohioans immediate property tax relief,[1] they should create a more transparent and even playing field between districts seeking revenue and citizens being asked to vote on tax measures. Proposals, discussed in this piece, regarding emergency and replacement levies were approved in the final budget.

If anything, this budget was a stark reminder that the days of money raining from Washington and Columbus are over. While the state continues to invest heavily in K–12 education, the school system must return to more normal budgeting routines. Can school leaders adjust in ways that keep student achievement afloat—and even boost it—by stretching their school dollar? That’s the multi-billion-dollar question that matters most for Ohio students.

Policymakers recently put the finishing touches on Ohio’s budget for fiscal years 2026 and 2027. The final bill covers a variety of important education issues, but some under-the-radar provisions regarding teacher data are particularly noteworthy. They require DEW to annually collect teacher vacancy data from all public schools, disaggregate it in a variety of ways (like by subject and grade), and then publicly track both teacher supply (via enrollment and completion rates for preparation programs) and demand.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of this policy. Teacher shortages have been making headlines in Ohio for years, but because the state wasn’t collecting detailed data on teacher vacancies, policymakers couldn’t get an accurate picture of the problem. Thanks to the budget, Ohio’s days of flying blind are over. Not only will lawmakers be empowered to make data-driven decisions and investments, education leaders across the Buckeye State will have access to accurate and detailed information about shortages in their communities.

It’s impossible to predict what these data will show. But if they do reveal troubling teacher shortages, lawmakers should be ready to act. Here are six ideas they should consider—three that won’t require state investment and another three that will.

Policy changes that don’t require state funding

1. Exempt out-of-state teachers from reading coursework requirements if they pass the state’s Foundations of Reading licensure exam on the first try.

State law requires most teachers to pass Ohio’s Foundations of Reading exam prior to receiving their teaching license. Ohio Administrative Code also requires the completion of a minimum of twelve semester hours of college coursework covering topics like phonics, phonemic awareness, and reading instruction. Although these expectations also apply to out-of-state teachers, there is some flexibility. Applicants for a one-year, nonrenewable out-of-state teaching license who pass the Foundations of Reading exam on the first try are permitted to work toward meeting the state’s reading coursework requirement while teaching on their temporary license. But the fact that they are required to complete any coursework at all is a significant barrier, considering they’re already licensed. Passing the Foundations of Reading exam should be enough to demonstrate that an out-of-state educator has the knowledge to teach literacy in Ohio. As such, lawmakers should allow teachers with valid out-of-state licenses who pass the exam on their first attempt to be exempt from all reading coursework requirements.

2. Eliminate mandatory step-and-lane teacher-salary schedules.

Ohio law requires districts to adopt salary schedules based on teachers’ seniority and college credits earned. This system has the benefit of simplicity, as teachers can predict with some certainty when and how they will receive a raise. But there are also drawbacks. Mandatory schedules typically prescribe low starting salaries to early career teachers, which means districts pay senior teachers more even when they’re not as effective or are teaching in less demanding subjects. Salary schedules also mandate substantial pay bumps when teachers receive a master’s degree, despite the lack of evidence that master’s degrees enhance effectiveness. In both cases, the system ignores teachers’ individual contributions to student learning, their specialized skills, and their willingness to work in more challenging environments.

Policymakers could address this issue by repealing state salary-schedule requirements. Without mandatory schedules, district leaders could determine how best to pay their staff, including by linking pay to student outcomes or satisfactory evaluations. While school boards may still adopt rigid salary schedules, they would no longer be required to do so.

3. Remove coursework requirements for teacher tenure.

State law outlines several conditions teachers must meet to be eligible for tenure. In addition to holding a license for a minimum of seven years, most teachers must complete thirty semester hours of additional coursework. Like the state’s mandated salary schedule, this incentivizes teachers to sit through more coursework and pursue expensive credentials that don’t clearly benefit students and therefore aren’t a productive use of their time, effort, and money. Rather than tying tenure to coursework, lawmakers should allow districts to create their own requirements, including a demonstration of effectiveness.

Policy changes that will require state funds

1. Increase funding for Ohio’s hugely popular Grow Your Own initiative.

In 2023, Ohio lawmakers established the Grow Your Own Teacher Scholarship Program. As part of this program, eligible high school seniors and school employees who commit to teaching in a qualifying school for at least four years after graduating from a teacher training program can be awarded scholarships of up to $7,500 for up to four years. Thus far, the program has proven to be hugely popular. Two hundred applications were completed during the 2024–25 cycle and a whopping 639 were completed for 2025–26. Clearly, there’s an appetite for this kind of opportunity. Lawmakers should consider increasing the state’s investment in future years so that even more prospective teachers have an affordable pathway into the classroom. 

2. Create a new “Ohio Values Teachers” Scholarship to provide $5,000 per year to outstanding students who pursue teaching degrees at an Ohio college or university.

Research indicates that having student debt can motivate graduates to choose substantially higher-salary jobs, and could reduce the likelihood that they choose to work in “low-paid, public interest” jobs like education. Establishing a statewide scholarship program aimed at making college more affordable could help bring high achievers into the classroom. The 2023 state budget already laid some groundwork via the Governor’s Merit Scholarship, which provides up to $5,000 in financial assistance for four years to Ohio seniors who graduate in the top 5 percent of the class. Creating a complementary program for prospective teachers could build on that effort and bolster Ohio’s teacher pipeline. Lawmakers should create the “Ohio Values Teachers” scholarship, which would award an additional $5,000 per year to those who qualify for the Governor’s Merit Scholarship, pursue teaching degrees at Ohio colleges and universities, and pledge to work in Ohio schools for at least five years.

3. Create a refundable tax credit for teachers working in high-poverty schools.

High-poverty schools need effective teachers. But issues such as lower salaries, inadequate support from administration, school culture and student discipline issues, and high turnover rates hinder schools’ ability to recruit and retain talent. Addressing all these problems would require a host of structural reforms, but the state could alleviate concerns about low salaries by creating a tax credit for teachers who work in high-poverty schools. This program would allow state leaders to put more money directly into teachers’ pockets without getting tangled up in salary negotiations with local unions and school boards, while also providing an incentive for teachers to choose to work in high-need schools.

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Collecting and analyzing teacher vacancy data is a huge step forward for Ohio. For the first time, policymakers and advocates will be able to assess teacher shortages based on actual numbers instead of anecdotal reports. Armed with this data, state and local leaders will soon know where to take big steps—like those outlined above—toward bolstering the teacher pipeline.

Data show that the number of homeschooling families in America is growing, and is similar in size now to the private and charter school sectors. Researching the topic is difficult because there is no centralized “sector” per se, but available evidence also strongly suggests that homeschool families are more diverse today than in the past. Credit for a trove of recent research in this area goes to Johns Hopkins senior research fellow (and former Fordham EEPS scholar) Angela Watson. She is back again, with Kennesaw State University’s Matthew Lee, continuing to dig into troves of data to further sharpen the picture of modern homeschooling from as many angles as possible.

Watson and Lee’s analysis, published in a new working paper, uses data from a nationally representative sample of parents, collected in partnership with the Indiana non-profit organization EdChoice and the polling firm Morning Consult during the spring of 2024. Nearly 3,200 parents completed the survey, accounting for over 5,160 school-aged children. Approximately 250 parents reported homeschooling one or more of their children. This is comparable to parents reporting students in private schools (288) and in non-traditional public options such as charters or intradistrict open enrollment (320).

A quick look at demographic data reiterate the diversity of today’s homeschooling sector. While 69 percent of homeschool parents are White (relative to 56 percent of all parents in the sample), a substantial proportion of Hispanic (15 percent vs. 22 percent) and Black families (10 percent vs. 12 percent) also report homeschooling their children. Homeschool families are less likely to live in urban settings (24 percent vs. 33 percent of all parents in the sample) and more likely to live in rural settings (25 percent vs. 15 percent), which is part of the more-traditional picture of homeschoolers. However, a similar proportion of suburban (41 percent of homeschoolers vs. 43 percent overall) and small-town families (11 percent vs. 9 percent) also choose homeschooling. Homeschool parents are more likely to report being Republicans (44 percent vs. 36 percent overall) and conservative (43 percent vs. 32 percent). Yet a substantial proportion of homeschooling parents identify as Democrats (29 percent), independents (27 percent), liberals (25 percent), and moderates (32 percent). There are more comparisons in the paper, but this is a good illustration to start.

Most homeschooled students were reported as learning full-time at home (71 percent), while 18 percent are in a cooperative setting, 8 percent in a hybrid school, and 3 percent reported in some undefined “other” type of setting. They are generally equally distributed across all grades, with some higher concentrations in transitional grades like 7th and 9th grade (middle-to-high school), as well as 11th grade (nearing graduation). Interestingly, more than one-third of families with at least one homeschooled child also have a student enrolled in a traditional district school. Another 9 percent of homeschoolers have a child in a charter school. In a recent interview, Watson called this finding a “big deal,” as it is solid evidence that the choice to homeschool is not the wholesale rejection of the institutions of public or private education that it was historically thought to be. Different students have different needs, and the widespread school closures of 2020 and 2021 both brought this fact to the fore and gave parents from all walks of life the permission (or determination) needed to branch out and find the best fit for their own young learners.

Additionally, Watson and Lee embedded a fully randomized conjoint experiment into their survey. In such an experiment, respondents are presented with consecutive sets of hypothetical options with randomly assigned attributes and asked to select their preferred option within the set. This version presented parents with six sets of twelve hypothetical high school graduates and asked them to identify which they thought was the most “successful” graduate within each set. They used this method to sample parent perspectives on five components of student success: standardized test scores, college matriculation, civic outcomes, academic skills, and religiosity. Students with strong test score performance (“average” or “above average” scores) were seen by all parents—homeschool and non-homeschool alike—as the most successful graduates overall, with students who had been accepted to “prestigious colleges” next, followed by those with “active community involvement” and those who had been accepted to a plain vanilla “college or university.” Students with average academic skills (such as literacy and numeracy), as well as minimal religious involvement, were rated at the lowest end of the success scale by all parents. The only factors homeschool parents rated differently from non-homeschool parents was in placing less emphasis on admission to a prestigious college and in rating even further down graduates who were not active in religion. The variation was statistically significant for these two factors, but small in magnitude.

Like most of Angela Watson’s recent research into modern homeschooling, this report seems more like baseline setting than breaking new ground. But creating that foundational understanding—what, where, how, and why families choose to homeschool some or all of their children—is an important act of “newness” in itself. Revamping tired stereotypes of religiously-motivated rural White families with an aversion to any institutional education trappings—especially in the post-pandemic world where homeschooling is more appealing and achievable than ever—allows for a clarified picture of who is in the “sector” and why they chose it. Not to mention the fact that, despite their choices outside of a traditional educational system, homeschoolers seem to want similar outcomes for students from their participation. These are the data we seek in all other education sectors, and this work will help put homeschooling research onto equal footing with options like charter and private schools. It’s invaluable.

SOURCE: Angela R. Watson and Matthew H. Lee, “Who Homeschools and What Does ‘Success’ Mean to Them? Experimental Evidence from a National Sample,” Harvard Kennedy School working paper (June 2025).

College graduation rates have been steadily increasing among White, Black, and Hispanic populations for the last five decades, although both Black and Hispanic students lag far behind their White counterparts. Additionally, the graduation rates for men in all three groups have been on a much slower growth trajectory than for women. That began around 1970, effectively reversing the gender gap in favor of men that had existed for generations before that. In fact, Hispanic women in the 1990 birth cohort are poised to notch higher college graduation rates than Black males. What is behind these shifting patterns and what does the future hold? A new working paper aims to find out.

A trio of researchers extend their previous work, which analyzed the career and family decisions of women born between 1935 and 1975, by adding the education component, now also including males in their modeling, and stretching the timeline. Data in both studies come from the Current Population Survey (CPS) of the U.S. Census Bureau.

The new study starts by creating a model of individual and family decision-making for students born between 1960 and 1980 (as well as fitting a broad range of other demographic and labor market outcomes over the same period), with groups of students broken out in ten-year cohorts. The model assumes that White, Black, and Hispanic individuals have common preferences for school, work, marriage, and fertility/family size. These preferences are assumed to differ by gender, but are held fixed over cohorts. The three factors that do differ across cohorts (and by gender/race) are parental background, consisting of mothers’ education, parent’s marital status, and parent’s immigration status; labor market conditions, specifically, job offers and wage levels; and what are termed “marriage market conditions,” or the frequency and quality of marriage offers.[1] By adjusting the various components and running several robustness checks, they are confident that the model describes the college graduation patterns observed…and more labor, education, and family-related outcomes besides. They conclude that changes in parental background factors account for one quarter of the observed growth in women’s college graduation from the ’60 to ’80 cohort. Marriage market factors account for another one-fifth and labor market factors explain the rest.

The researchers then use their model to project outcomes forward for the student cohorts born in 1990, 2000, and 2010. They predict that White women’s graduation rates will plateau, while that of Hispanic and Black women will grow rapidly. But the aggregate graduation rate for women will grow very slowly due to the combination of these trends. For just a few specifics: Since the college graduation rate of White mothers increased from 38 percent in the 1990 cohort to 51 percent in the 2010 cohort, the graduation rates of their daughters are predicted to hit a peak and flatten out (at around 53 percent) because the remainder of the cohort consists of women whose mothers did not graduate. The college graduation rate of White men (married or not) is predicted to grow slightly faster than for White women, narrowing but not closing the gap between them. For Black women, the college graduation rate of mothers increased from 13 percent in the 1980 cohort to 19 percent in the 1990 cohort and 28 percent in 2010. This will result in a predicted boost of the graduation rate of their daughters from 24 percent (1980 cohort) to 28 percent (1990) to 33 percent (2010). For Black men, the graduation rate is predicted to rise modestly over time, increasing the gap between them and Black women. The pattern for Hispanic individuals—both men and women—is similar to that of Black individuals, for the same reasons.

We must consider that these projections are models only and are built on trend data from decades earlier. More on this in a moment. But it is interesting that, in their conclusion, the authors discuss some more prosaic reasons underlying both the observed and predicted gender gap outcomes. For example: Women’s rate of return on the investment required to earn a college degree has increased faster than men’s in recent years—in both the labor and marriage markets (corny and misogynistic as it may sound, they’re talking about meeting and marrying college-educated men as a measure of marriage prospect “quality”). And while the labor market returns for men are still higher, women’s returns have increased quickly as more and more enter and remain in the workforce.[2]

And in the end, that is the moral of the story: Despite being able to show mathematically—and empirically—that the college graduation rate’s gender gap has strongly reversed in favor of women in the last fifty years across the racial and ethnic groups studied, men still fare better in the labor market due to a combination of longstanding societal and structural factors. At the same time, modern-day and near-future externalities will likely shake the foundation of both the statistical model and the real world outcomes. To name just a few items: There is evidence that the long-rising “college wage premium” may have plateaued overall (and even begun shrinking) for graduates versus their non-degreed peers, there are fast-moving economic changes today that might impact college degree holders more strongly than others, and the marriage and fertility rate declines are real and likely accelerating. It all combines to feel like a perfect storm of headwinds threatening to cause women—along with all non-White college graduates—to slip further back down the economic ladder in the future despite their degrees.

SOURCE: Zvi Eckstein, Michael P. Keane, Osnat Lifshitz, “What Explains Growing Gender and Racial Education Gaps?” NBER Working Papers (June 2025).