By Bradley Rosenberg

Northeastern’s Center for Labor Market Studies recently reported that women from the major cities of Massachusetts are more likely than men from the same cities to finish high school, enroll in college, and earn a college degree.

According to the study, 15 percent of Massachusetts boys drop out of high school every year before earning their diploma, a 4 percent increase compared to the drop out rate of girls. In the large central cities of the state, nearly one third of high school boys will not graduate while the high school dropout rate of girls has only marginally increased. The study reveals that, in all of the central cities (excluding Springfield), the dropout rate between the two sexes differs greatly, sometimes even by double digits, and that this will heavily impact the state of male poverty levels and incarceration rates, the number of Massachusetts families, and the future labor market.

To complement the percentages of high school graduates, the study also stated that an average of 48 percent of men from Massachusetts’ 11 large central and inner cities will both graduate from high school and go on to college while 62 percent of women from those same cities will wind up attending a university. The men from affluent suburbs such as Brookline and Lexington, meanwhile, are more than four times more likely to graduate from high school and attend a four-year college than central and inner city men, and this only further emphasizes the need among inner city males for academic assistance.

Statistics on college success have shown that 170 women will earn an associate’s degree for every 100 men and 130 bachelor’s degrees for every 100 men and that, throughout the past two decades, women have increasingly attained higher numbers of associate’s, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees than their opposing gender.

While the academic achievement of women is celebrated by the study’s authors, they also state that the problems of the central city male need addressing, for, without an increase in male education, the long-term economic prospects of the male population will be poor.