“The present value a man gets from attending college is typically a lot higher than a woman gets from going to college, largely because of the majors they pick,” says Hopkins.
While high ratios of men and women seek business administration degrees, men are more focused in high-paying fields like computer science, electrical engineering and communications engineering, while women selected lower-paying fields like education, social work and counseling, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
“The male degrees pay twice as much. If parents are making an economic decision, it makes sense that they’ll pay more for those who will end up earning more,” says Hopkins.
The parents of only boys were less likely to consider a lower cost alternative to their schools of choice. While 72 percent of the parents of all girls said they would consider sending their daughters to a less expensive school to avoid student loans, only 70 percent of the parents of all boys said they would do the same with their sons, according to the report.
“Parents are putting their girls into preconceived categories based on out-dated assumptions, like college education isn’t as important for young women, but the world has moved on,” says Wright. “These ongoing stereotypes lead to negative consequences. We know more girls than boys are going to college, we know that more women are becoming breadwinners for their families. But we forget that financial stability is still more important for women than it is for men because women will live longer on average.”
The survey also found that parents are willing to compromise or sacrifice some or all of their retirement in order to help fund their children’s college education. More of the parents in the survey were saving for their children’s college, 53 percent, than were saving for their own retirement, 49 percent.
Yet parents of boys are more likely to prioritize college savings over retirement. According to the survey, 68 percent of the parents of all boys say that saving for their children’s education is a greater priority than retirement, compared to 50 percent of the parents of all girls.
Boys, at 45 percent, were more likely to agree that their education is more important than their parents’ retirement compared to girls, at 27 percent.
Young says that there is evidence that boys are more confident about their college savings than girls.
“It certainly looks like a pattern,” says Young. “Three years ago, we asked the children whether they thought their parents were saving for college, and we saw a similar gap between girls and boys. In 2014, 52 percent of boys and 43 percent of girls thought their parents were saving, so that’s somewhat of a consistent finding.”