Wandering around campus, sitting in lecture, riding the 50, the Rapid city bus that connects Grand Valley's two campus locations, to and from Grand Valley State University I noticed one thing in particular; there are more women than men. Turns out my observation was right. According to the 2013 census done by the National Center of Education Statistics, women took up 57.9% of the undergraduate enrollment at GVSU that year, compared to the 42.1% of men enrolled. That is an extreme 15.8% difference. Even at the first-ranked university in the United States, Princeton University, the Ivy League private institution located in New Jersey, women overtake men at 51.6% of the 2013 undergraduate enrollment. This is known as the college gender gap, referring to the differences between women and men in higher education enrollment. Until the 1980s men exceeded women in undergraduate enrollment, but since then women have overtaken men in this aspect due to contributing factors such as altered perceptions of marriage, the rise of the women's liberation movement, an increase in women joining the labor force, men finding alternative jobs that don't require secondary schooling.
Marriage used to mean total self-sacrifice in the name of the family and social responsibility, especially for women. In the 1960s women were expected to marry in their early twenties and start a family, then devote their lives to being housewives and mothers. For most women, that meant not having secondary education or any career aspirations. Of the women that did work in the 1960s, 38%, were limited to jobs such as teachers, nurses, or secretaries, all gender based occupations, and were unwelcome in professional fields; making up only six percent of doctors, three percent of lawyers, and a slim 1% of engineers. Yet, in the last 50 years perceptions of gender roles within a marriage have changed. Its no longer just the women of the household staying home, according to a study done by Rich Morin, a senior editor for the Pew Research Center, roughly 550,000 men in the last decade are staying home full-time with their children, nearly double the number in the 1970s, which was about 280,000 (Morin).