Why Women Pursue Continuing Education
CourseAdvisor.com survey reveals higher education and career trends among women
June 2008 — CourseAdvisor recently surveyed more than 400 women and found that 83.2% believe their career opportunities have improved in the past five to 10 years. However, 38% still struggle to balance work and life, and 35.3% are currently trying to increase their salaries.
Why women pursue continuing education
There is a variety of reasons why women choose to return to school. Of the women interviewed for the CourseAdvisor survey, 75% already enrolled or planning to enroll in a continuing education program within the next year listed one or more of these reasons as primary motivators for going back to school:
- Advancing their current career
- Improving their current salary
- Starting or changing careers
- Returning to the workforce
- Pursuing personal interests
The majority of respondents to the CourseAdvisor survey were 18-22 years of age (27.9%), followed by 41-50 years of age (20%). Thirty-seven percent had a high school diploma or GED and 20% held four-year college degrees.
Earning a college degree: women are catching up to men
A recent report by the U.S. Education Department also showed that women have made great strides relative to men during the last 10 years and account for nearly two-thirds of the increase in the number of bachelor's and master's degrees. In addition, the report predicts that overall growth in degree-granting college programs will reach 15.6 million by the fall of 2008, with for-profit colleges awarding more than twice as many associate degrees than they had a decade earlier and six times as many bachelor's degrees.
Balancing career, education, and home
The CourseAdvisor survey asked women about their employment status, their career goals, and the education they were choosing to achieve those goals. The survey revealed that:
- Nearly half the respondents work full-time (47.4%), while 27.6% aren't working at all.
- When asked about ideal work environment, over half (52.4%) said they prefer to work full-time, while 26.8% prefer to have the flexibility to chose where and when they work.
- 25.6% of women surveyed are pursuing a degree in healthcare industry, followed by 15.5% in business, 13.6% in education, and 10.5% in psychology/human services.
- A combined 46.9% intend to enroll in an online-only or blended online/campus program for the flexibility in managing family/work schedules, although 16.5% of those women also said that even if flexibility were not essential, they would be more confident participating in an online class from home rather than in a campus classroom environment anyway.
- More than three-quarters of women in a continuing education program plan to seek financial aid.
How the recession affects women
Interestingly, the recession has not had a severe impact on the group of women participating in the CourseAdvisor survey. Only 28.9% of the women are increasing hours at their current job, going back into the workforce, or seeking a second job because of the downturn in the economy, and only 23.1% are trying to reduce costs by looking for a job closer to home or by working from home more frequently.
"Women have become increasingly employed in higher-paying occupations during the past several decades, undoubtedly because their higher education made them more eligible for those careers and jobs. In fact, more than half of all the workers in management, professional, and related occupations are women. These important advances in women's educational achievement are encouraging and illustrate that women seriously value higher education and are actively pursuing career advancement. The core challenges now are to make higher education affordable for even more women and to bring women's pay up to the level of men's pay in all equivalent jobs." —Carlos Cashman, CourseAdvisor President, 2005-2008
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Lisa Ruffino is CourseAdvisor's editor