Recently I gave an extra-credit assignment in one of my courses. The course has twenty students, eleven men and nine women. Six students chose to do the assignment — and then I noticed something in my grade book: all of them were women. Getting all statistic-y about it: 66.7% of the females were willing to do the extra work, while 0% if the men were.
Anecdotal, but fascinating.
Part of the explanation for why a significantly higher percentage of women graduate from college? Men and women start college in roughly equal numbers, but the dropout rate for men is consistently much higher.
Here is a related post of mine from last year, on why children of immigrants perform better in college than children of American’s whose families have been here for awhile.
On the other side of the ledger, though, here is a site devoted to college dropouts who made good.