Marriage, Intergenerational Schooling Efiect, and Gender Gap in College Attainment ⁄

One striking phenomenon in the U.S. labor market is the reversal of the gender gap in college attainment. Females have outnumbered males in college attainment since 1987. We develop a discrete choice model of the college entry decision to study the efiects of changes in relative earnings, changes in parental education, and changes in the marriage market on time series observations of college attainment by gender. We flnd that the increasing relative earnings between college and high school persons and the increases of parental education have important efiects on the increase in college attainment for both genders, while the decrease of marriage rates is crucial in explaining the reversal of gender gap in college attainment.