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The Census Bureau has released data according to which there is a widening of gap between employed women and men with college degrees. The 2010 census figures show that only 35% of men have a bachelor’s degree or higher as compared to 37% of women.

Americans aged 25 and above were used by the Consensus Bureau to arrive at the figures.  The age 25 was arrived at to include those who take that much time to complete their degrees. There is a huge education gap among people between 25 and 30 years of age. In this range, only 28 percent of men hold bachelors or higher degree as compared to 36 percent in women.

According to Brookings Institution Metropolitan Policy Program’s senior fellow Alan Berube, the field of higher education today sees men being outpaced by women. This is because more women go to college and strive to complete their degrees.

The first time this happened was in the year 2006 when women surpassed men in college degree numbers. According to Berube, there will be a change in the household calculus on who will be spending valuable time in the labor market.

There will be a change in perspective on default assumptions such as who will do housework, who will take care of the kids and who will be earning more. This is evident as earnings essentially depend on educational attainment.

Master’s degree or higher is held by more than 10.6 million women beyond the undergraduate level. This is more in comparison to the 10.5 million men. Apart from education, other fields where women surpass men include health services. Men outpace women in fields such as construction, agriculture and manufacturing. These disparities are attributed to the economic meltdown by analysts.

Berube opines that fields such as healthcare, education and government that are not affected by the economic turndown are sought after by women. He also says that it was a male recession where male dominated industries such as finance, construction and manufacturing were affected the most.

A comprehensive view of our country’s educational attainment is offered by this data. According to a Census Bureau demographer Sonia Collazo, more information was added this year. She said that more numbers of people are completing school, high school and bachelor’s degrees and advanced degrees now as compared to previous years.

There is a three percent increase in the number of adults with a high school diploma in 2010. College degrees were held the most by Asians which is evident with the fact that more than fifty percent of them in America hold bachelor‘s or higher degrees. As compared to them, only about 33 percent of whites, twenty percent blacks and fourteen percent Hispanics hold degrees.

However most of the college going or high school population is still not able to compete their degrees even as there is a significant increase shown by the data. On the college level, four percent of the population dropped out of graduate school before completion of degree and seventeen percent attended college and have still not got their degrees.