Gender differences in dropping out of university and switching majors

Some seven years ago, I had a couple of summer research scholarship students look at dropping out of university (specifically, the management degree at the University of Waikato), including the factors associated with dropping out, and what led to student persistence. One factor that strongly predicted dropping out was gender - male students had over one-third lower odds of completing their degree than female students.

So, I was interested to read this 2018 article by Carmen Astorne-Figari and Jamin Speer (both University of Memphis), published in the journal Economics Letters (sorry, I don't see an ungated version online). They specifically look at gender differences in dropping out, as well as gender differences in switching majors, at university. Using data from the 1997 cohort of the National Longitudinal Study of Youth (NLSY97), which included nearly 3000 students who attended college and reported at least one GPA, Astorne-Figari and Speer found that:

Males are 7.7 percentage points (or 22%) more likely to drop out. The male-female differential is about the same as the effect of one point of GPA... the gender gap reverses for major switching: women are 7.6 percentage points more likely than men to switch majors. These effects perfectly offset so that there is no gender gap in major persistence. This is in contrast to the racial/ethnic gaps, as both blacks and Hispanics are more likely to drop out and to switch majors.

So, the higher dropout rate for male students that my summer students found is not an aberration. Male students do appear to drop out in significantly greater numbers than female students do. However, the rate of completion of the major that students started their studies in does not differ between male and female students. One way of interpreting these results is that it appears that male and female students respond differently to the challenges of university study. If they find themselves in a field of study that they are not enjoying or doing well in, male students respond by dropping out, while female students respond by switching majors. Of course, it would be interesting to stratify the analysis by GPA, and see if there are really differences for students at the bottom end of the GPA distribution, but Astorne-Figari and Speer don't do that. However, they do look in more detail at STEM subjects and, interestingly, the results are slightly different:

Again, men are more likely to drop out of college, while women are more likely to switch out. Both gaps here are larger than in the overall sample, and the switching gap is particularly large... Women are 19.9 percentage points more likely to switch out of STEM, doubling the switching rate of men.

Unlike the overall results, there is a substantial gender gap in persistence for those who start in STEM fields. Women are 7.9 percentage points (18%) less likely to graduate in a STEM major conditional on starting one, driven by the huge gap in switching behavior.

So, completion rates of STEM majors are lower among female students than among male students. That may help to explain some of the gender gap in STEM graduates. However, it also poses a bit of a dilemma. Ideally, universities want to reduce the rate of students dropping out. But, if they implement some policy intervention to reduce dropout rates, more male than female students might be affected (if only because there are more male dropouts). That would tend to increase the gender gap in STEM even further, a point that Astorne-Figari and Speer also note:

...men’s higher dropout rates are actually keeping the STEM gender gap from being even larger, so better retention might also widen the gender gap in STEM.

However, one way of addressing disparities in dropout rates while not exacerbating the STEM gender gap might be to try policy interventions that help male students to change majors, rather than dropping out. Perhaps there is some other field that they are better suited to, but for some reason female students are better able (or more willing) to identify a new field than male students. This seems like something worth further investigation.