When FAMU held its commencement ceremonies this past fall, the sea of caps and gowns told a familiar story: rows of beaming graduates, most of them women. In the FAMU College of Pharmacy, female PharmD graduates in 2024-25 nearly outnumbered men nearly five to one. In the College of Law, the ratio was more than two to one. And in veterinary technology, all three graduates were women.
This isn’t just happening at FAMU. Across the country, a profound and accelerating gender shift is underway in higher education — one that is especially stark at historically Black colleges and universities, where the decline in male enrollment has been more pronounced than at most other institutions.
Across the nation, women now earn 40 percent more doctoral degrees and nearly twice as many master’s degrees as men, according to the U.S. Department of Education. They have become the majority in law schools, medical schools, and programs in dentistry, pharmacy and optometry. In veterinary medicine, they outnumber men by four to one.
The professional world is already reflecting the change. In law, women outnumbered men for the first time in 2019, according to the American Bar Association. By 2023, the majority of associates at law firms were women. In medicine, women became the majority of medical students in 2019 and now represent 55 percent of those training to become doctors.
The pattern holds across specialties: women dominate residencies in pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, family medicine, and psychiatry. In psychology, they outnumber men by three to one in doctoral programs and nearly four to one in master’s programs. In dentistry, 55 percent of graduates are women—a figure that rises to 72 percent in pediatric dentistry.
At FAMU, the figures are telling. In fall 2022, women made up 66.6 percent of the student body. Just a decade earlier, in 2010, the gender split was 60 percent female and 40 percent male. The trend shows no sign of slowing.
“That is a huge concern, when you think about where economies are going,” said Claudia Buchmann, a sociologist at Ohio State University who studies the gender gap in education. “If we’re trying to compete on a global level, the fact that men’s college-going rates are so stagnant means we can’t fix this problem until we get more men.”
The reasons behind the gender gap are complex. Many men are forgoing college to enter trades or start working right after high school. Even those who earn bachelor’s degrees are less likely than women to pursue advanced education. And some may be discouraged by what they perceive as the “feminization” of certain professions, according to research by veterinary medical colleges.
Nearly half of women ages 25 to 34 hold a bachelor’s degree, compared with 37 percent of men in the same age group, according to the Pew Research Center.
The consequences extend far beyond campus quads. As educational attainment among men stagnates, the United States has fallen in global rankings for advanced degrees. The proportion of Americans 25 and older with master’s degrees or higher has dropped from first in the world in 2000 to 24th today, according to the World Bank.
The gender gap is also reshaping relationships and family formation. Marriage rates have fallen as educational disparities have grown, with new studies suggesting that differences in attainment are influencing how and when people form families.
Yet despite these broad implications, there has been little public reckoning with the trend.
“I’m not seeing a national effort to say we need to change this,” Dr. Buchmann said. “If anything, the opposite is true.”
As more women lead in professions that influence health, law, business, and education, the very architecture of American expertise is being remade—not by loud upheaval, but through a quiet revolution in who earns a degree.
And, for HBCUs, the stakes are especially high. HBCUs have long been engines of Black social mobility and professional success. If men continue to opt out, the gender divide could threaten that legacy, and the Black family, and alter the future of an entire generation.