Attainment, College Degree

In order to achieve full participation in the global knowledge-based economy of the present and future and to ensure development of prosperous world enterprise, all women must be positioned to obtain degrees in higher education. This article reviews past and recent findings regarding the status of international women in terms of college degree attainment. Some additional information relevant to the educational background and skills necessary for successful college preparation includes literacy rates and primary and secondary education completion rates, as these are vital indicators in the process that prepares women for attainment of higher education degrees.

Modern economies in both advanced and developing countries must have a highly educated workforce of women in all leading areas of science and technology in order to prosper and grow in cutting-edge fields like bioinformatics, nanotechnology, neuroscience, neuromedicine, genetic engineering, behavioral economics, and many others. Having a college degree has been associated with higher lifetime income, more secure retirement, career flexibility, and the ability to achieve middle-class status or better. Robert Barro and Jhong-Wha Lee report that the wage differential in income of a college-educated individual compared to income of a person with only a primary (elementary education) is 240 percent.

A recent U.S. Central Intelligence Agency publication, the CIA World Factbook, reports that countries with a higher percentage of population with college degrees have lower unemployment rates than those countries with less educational attainment. This suggests that a college degree may help reduce the risk of unemployment for women during a global economic downturn because those women prepared with a college education may represent a better match to ever-evolving technical, medical, scientifically advanced, and highly skilled jobs of the future.

This, however, was not the case in Poland, where the economic downturn may have affected the population more broadly. It appears that there are exceptions to how well an advanced education can protect degree holders from the risk of unemployment. A possible drawback associated with college degree attainment for females relates to the tendency for many women to postpone childbirth until after degree attainment, which, in some cases, has been associated with reduced fertility patterns due to increased maternal age.