Basic Trope: Women are more likely to attend or graduate from higher education than men are.
- Straight: Upon graduating from High School, most of the girls in Troperville High's senior class plan to go to college. Only half of the boys in the same class do.
- Exaggerated: None of the boys plan to go to college, and few of them will even get a high school diploma. Every last one of the girls go to college.
- Downplayed: A few more girls go to college than guys.
- Justified:
- The town is largely poor, and more of the girls come from families better able to pay for college than the boys do.
- The boys have been taught that college is a waste, or that intellect isn't cool.
- The girls find it easier to get grants and scholarships to help pay for college, whereas boys have a harder time acquiring it when they need it.
- The town has a major manufacturing business, so many of the men can get good jobs with less education, while the factory is reluctant to hire women (except in the office, where degrees help).
- Boys in general prefer to learn their required skills alternative from higher education such as from the internet or signing up for a trade school.
- Inverted: All the boys intend to go to college, but only half of the girls do.
- Subverted:
- Although many of the girls intend to go to college, a good portion of them end up not going.
- Of the girls going to college, only about half of them actually graduate. The rest become Tragic Dropouts.
- Alice is only going to college because her parents want her to. She really wants to learn a trade.
- Many of the girls are going to trade school, or joining the military.
- The girls tend to be going for an MRS Degree more than an actual career-focused education. Or, if this is a period piece, going to finishing school instead of actual college, to be trained in the arts of homemaking, style, and party-hosting.
- Plenty of the boys are going to college.
- Many of the boys are simply putting college off or looking for another way to pay for it, such as the military.
- Double Subverted:
- A lot of the boys don't graduate or attend college either.
- The girls not going to college end up going Back to School sometime later.
- A disproportionately large number of the boys in college end up dropping out or flunking out, or spending more time engaging in Wacky Fratboy Hijinx than studying.
- Fewer men end up going to grad school after completing college.
- Parodied: Bob has to fend off many and varied protests to make his parents let him go to college, and when he gets there, his mostly female classmates react with shock and awe seeing a young man on campus.
- Zig-Zagged: The female-to-male ratio of new university students varies depending on the year, jurisdiction, school, and discipline.
- Averted:
- Both genders are going to (and graduating from) college at roughly equal rates.
- No one in the senior class is going to a traditional four-year college; they're all joining the military, getting married, learning trades, or going straight into the workforce.
- Enforced: The producer pressured the writers to push the message that Women Are Wiser and to reflect the increasing trend of women attaining education, so all female characters and only them are shown to have a bachelor's degree.
- Lampshaded: "Boys seem to regard college as something of a plague."
- Invoked: Troperville High School only encourages girls to go to college, because the town's economy is based around manual labor (mining, for example) and they want to keep the boys at home.
- Exploited: A college markets itself to girls more than it does to boys.
- Defied: More girls choose not to go to college, and/or more boys choose to go to college.
- Discussed: Two incoming college boys talk about how easy it will be to get a girlfriend because there will be far more women than men there.
- Conversed: "I'm surprised there are so few complaints that this show is run by Straw Feminists."
- Implied: ???
- Deconstructed:
- Troperville's economy declines as it deindustrializes, and the men no longer have the opportunity to walk into a factory career from high school.
- It turns out that college is more appealing to girls than to boys, but not for a good reason.
- Reconstructed: The men learn skills in one or more new industries with many companies that don't always call for degrees.
- Plotted a Good Waste: There are far more girls than boys in the class, so it stands to reason that more girls than boys are going to college after graduation.
- Played for Laughs: Alice's parents are pleased, but not particularly surprised, to learn of her acceptance to Harvard. Her similarly smart younger brother Bob, on the other hand, is also accepted to Harvard two years later, and his parents are flabbergasted.
- Played for Drama: Bob is pressured by his parents to not go to college, with many attacks on his masculinity.
Back to Higher Education Is for Women.
