Women were more likely to be in college or have graduated by the age of 22 than men. That’s good news for them for an array of reasons.
Not only is higher education necessary in the future economy where nearly a third of jobs are expected to require a post-high school degree, but it apparently will make them happier in their marriages too.
And on a side note, women were more likely to have volunteered in the past year too.
Both are findings from the latest deluge of data from the Labor Department, which released a report on volunteering in the U.S. and the latest findings from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1997 this week.
Data from the longitudinal study showed that 29% of women were attending college in October when they were 22 compared to 25% of men. Another 13% of women had earned a bachelor’s degree, more than the 7% of men. There are three main reasons for that: Women are more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to attend college and less likely to drop out of college.
The data comes after the 11th round of interviews, conducted in 2007 and 2008 among about 9,000 people, when the respondents were between 22 and 28 years old.
Overall just 10% of young people had received a bachelor’s degree by the time they were 22. Some 27% were enrolled in college, 44% finished high school but didn’t attend college and 7% received their General Educational Development (GED) credential and were not enrolled in college. Another 11% were high school dropouts.
The new data also sheds some light on young people’s work attachments. They held an average of 4.4 jobs between ages 18 and 22. The youngest baby boomers, born between 1957 and 1964, held an average of 3.8 jobs between 18 and 21-years-old. By the time they were 40, they had held an average of 10.5 jobs.
For today’s young adults, they were employed, on average, 69% of the weeks between when they were 18 and 22 years old. They were looking for work but unable to find it 6% of the weeks and they were neither working, nor searching for jobs, 25% of those weeks.
As for volunteerism, 26.8% of the population – or 63.4 million people – volunteered at least once between September 2008 and 2009.That’s up from 26.4% in 2008. Some 30.1% of women volunteered, compared to 23.3% of men.
“As in previous years, women volunteered at a higher rate than did men across all age groups, educational levels, and other major demographic characteristics,” the Labor Department noted.
But men volunteered for longer. They spent a median of 52 hours volunteering compared to 50 hours for women.
Whites, people with higher education levels, married people or those between the ages of 35 and 54 were more likely to volunteer than their counterparts,
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