The Explosion of Female College Attendance

Abstract

[Excerpt] This paper will attempt to determine the extent to which changes in female college attendance over time have been responses to the various factors discussed above. In Section I, a simple model of the college attendance decision is developed which incorporates most of the factors discussed above. Section II presents the results of fitting the specification implied by the theory developed in Section I to data on the college attendance choices of 29,141 women who were high school juniors in 1960. Major findings of this analysis are that female college attendance is very responsive to public decisions about the location of colleges and the level of tuition. A second finding is that the economic payoff to college is also an important determinant of attendance.