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What’s more, gay men’s college graduation rate dramatically bests even that of straight women, about one-third of whom have a bachelor’s degree. Mittleman found that gay men’s considerably higher levels of educational attainment hold even after taking into account differences in men’s race and birth cohorts. a rate 50 percent higher than that of straight men. Some 6 percent of gay men have a Ph.D., J.D. The three surveys of American adults consistently indicated that gay men are far more likely than straight men to have graduated from high school or college, with just over half of gay men having earned a college degree, compared with about 35 percent of straight men. From this, Mittleman mined a trove of data including 15,270 students’ high school and undergraduate transcripts. These major annual surveys - which focus on health, drug use and crime victimization - provided the sociologist with information regarding nearly half a million Americans’ diplomas.Īdditionally, the National Center for Education Statistics’ High School Longitudinal Study posed questions about sexuality for the first time to the cohort it followed between 20. Mittleman was able to reach his striking research findings thanks to a move during President Barack Obama’s second term to add questions about sexual orientation to a trio of federally funded, nationally representative surveys. Story continues Benefit of adding sexuality questions to surveys And the considerable academic progress that young women have charted since the advent of second-wave feminism has been largely restricted to the heterosexuals among them. It is, in fact, straight males who tend to be mired in a scholastic morass. Mittleman’s research indicates that this characterization of the educational gender gap is critically lacking in specificity. Today, women comprise 59.2 percent of college students, according to the National Student Clearinghouse. As the economic gap between those with and without a college degree has widened, women’s college graduation rate has risen in tandem, but men’s rate has remained largely stagnant for decades. In recent years, academics, lawmakers and journalists alike have sounded an increasingly urgent alarm that on balance, American males are stuck in a scholastic funk. “And the most vulnerable kids are going to show it first.” “This article is focusing a lens on what we do to all kids,” Lisa Diamond, a psychology professor at the University of Utah, said of the societal pressures that appear to impede lesbians in school even as these stressors possibly unnerve gay males into compensating for homophobia through academic striving.