This is a CollegeHelpGuide analysis of U.S. Department of Education College Scorecard data, which reports the earnings of former students separately for men and women about six years after they first entered college. The question we set out to answer: how common is a gender pay gap when you look school by school, and how large is it on average? The short version is that the gap is nearly universal across institutions, but the size and the reasons behind it need careful reading before anyone draws a conclusion about a specific college.
The gender pay gap usually gets discussed at the national level, as a single number for the whole workforce. That framing is useful for policy, but it does not help a 17-year-old deciding where to apply. So we looked at the gap a different way: one school at a time.
College Scorecard publishes median earnings for students who received federal financial aid, measured roughly six years after they first enrolled, and it breaks those figures out by gender. We compared men's and women's earnings at every institution that reports both. The result is one of the more consistent patterns in the entire dataset.
What We Found
Across the 3,576 schools that report six-year earnings for both men and women, men earned more on average than women. The gap was not a rounding error, and it was not confined to a handful of outlier campuses.
16.8%
Average amount by which women's six-year earnings fall below men's, across 3,576 colleges that report both figures
On average, men from these schools earned $37,591 about six years after entering college. Women from the same schools earned $31,262. That is a difference of $6,329, or 16.8 percent lower for women.
The more striking number is how widespread the pattern is. Of the 3,576 schools, men out-earned women at 3,384 of them. Women out-earned men at only 176. In other words, at roughly 95 percent of the institutions in this analysis, the men who attended went on to earn more than the women who attended, measured at the same point after enrollment.
For comparison, the federal data on the workforce as a whole describes a persistent earnings difference between men and women, and our school-level figure sits in the same general range. What the school-by-school view adds is the consistency: this is not a story about a few campuses dragging down an average. It shows up almost everywhere.
Why the Gap Is This Wide
It would be easy to read 16.8 percent as the amount a college shortchanges its female graduates. That reading would be wrong, and it matters that families understand why.
The earnings figure in College Scorecard is a school-level average across everyone who attended, regardless of what they studied or what job they took. It is not a comparison of a man and a woman doing the same work for the same employer. Three forces, none of which a college controls, push the school-level numbers apart.
Field-of-study mix
Different majors lead to different paychecks, and men and women still enroll in different majors at different rates. Engineering, computer science, and finance, fields with high early-career salaries, skew male at most schools. Education, social work, and several health and human-services fields, which pay less early on, skew female. When a school's male graduates are more concentrated in higher-paying fields, the school's average male earnings rise even if pay for any given role is identical.
A school that is heavily technical will tend to show a wider gap simply because of who studies what. A liberal arts college with a more even major distribution may show a narrower one. The campus did not cause the difference; the enrollment pattern did.
Hours worked and time out of the workforce
College Scorecard reports earnings, not hourly wages. Someone working full time earns more than someone working part time, even at the same rate of pay. In the first several years after college, differences in hours worked, including time taken out of the workforce, pull annual earnings apart in ways that have nothing to do with what a job pays per hour.
An early-career snapshot
The measurement happens about six years after a student first enrolled, which for many is only two or three years into full-time work. Early-career earnings are volatile and reflect first jobs, not career trajectories. A gap measured this early can widen or narrow over the following decade. The number describes a starting line, not a finish.
Do not read a school's gender earnings gap as a measure of how fairly that college treats women, or as proof that women "should" pick a different school. The gap is driven mostly by what students study and how much they work after graduating, not by the institution itself. Two schools with very different gaps may treat their students identically.
What the Data Cannot Tell You
Causation is the trap here. The data shows a correlation between gender and earnings at the school level. It does not show that being a woman caused lower pay for the same work, and it does not isolate any single explanation.
To know whether equal work earns equal pay, you would need to compare men and women in the same field, the same job, and the same number of hours. College Scorecard does not contain that comparison, and neither does this analysis. What it can tell you is that across nearly every college in the country, the average woman who attended earned less six years out than the average man who attended. The reasons are mostly upstream of the college and downstream of graduation.
The federal government can report earnings by gender at the school level only because of student aid records. The figures cover students who received federal Title IV aid, such as Pell Grants or federal loans, so they describe aided students rather than every graduate. Students who paid entirely out of pocket or with private scholarships are not in the count.
What Students and Families Can Take From This
The point of looking at the gap school by school was to see whether choosing a particular college could close it. The honest answer is that the choice of school matters far less than two other decisions: what to study and how early-career work is structured. A woman who picks a high-earning field will, on average, out-earn a man who picks a low-earning one, regardless of which campus either attended.
That reframes the practical advice.
If long-term earnings are a priority, spend your energy on the major and career path, not on hunting for a college with a smaller reported gender gap. The field you choose drives early earnings far more than the name on the diploma. Our research on the highest-paying college majors and the hardest college majors is a better starting point than any single school's gender numbers.
A few concrete moves follow from the data:
First, look at field-level earnings, not just school-level averages. College Scorecard also publishes earnings by program at many schools, which strips out the field-mix effect and gets closer to a fair comparison.
Second, weigh earnings against what you borrow. A higher salary means little if the debt that funded it is larger still. Our companion analysis of college ROI, earnings versus debt, pairs the earnings side of this question with the cost side.
Third, keep cost in the frame from the start. The average cost of college per year and the list of the cheapest colleges in every state help you control the one variable, price, that you can actually negotiate.
Fourth, if you are still weighing whether the whole investment pays off, our overview of whether college is worth it in 2026 ties the earnings data to the broader decision.
Methodology
We used the U.S. Department of Education's College Scorecard, the federal dataset that publishes outcomes for students who received Title IV financial aid.1 For each institution, College Scorecard reports median earnings measured approximately six years after students first enrolled, broken out by gender.
We included every institution that reported a six-year earnings figure for both men and women. That left a sample of 3,576 schools. For each school we recorded the male earnings figure and the female earnings figure, then computed the difference. Across the sample, we averaged the male figures ($37,591), averaged the female figures ($31,262), and took the difference ($6,329), which is 16.8 percent below the male average. We also counted, school by school, how many institutions reported higher earnings for men (3,384) versus higher earnings for women (176). The remaining schools in the sample reported figures close enough to be effectively tied at the rounding used in the source data.
We did not pull individual school names, rankings, or program-level figures for this analysis. The numbers above are aggregate counts and averages across the 3,576-school sample.
Several limitations deserve emphasis. Earnings are annual amounts measured at an early-career point, not lifetime or mid-career figures, so the gap shown here can shift over time. The figures cover only federally aided students, not every graduate. School-level averages blend together every field of study at an institution, so they reflect who enrolled in what and how much they worked, not pay for an identical job. Because the data does not hold field, hours, and role constant, it cannot measure equal-pay-for-equal-work, and nothing in this analysis should be read as doing so. Earnings also reflect the regions where graduates live and work, which affects salaries independent of any school or gender effect. For national context on enrollment and cost patterns we draw on the National Center for Education Statistics,2 and for context on workforce earnings differences we draw on the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.3
FAQ
Do men earn more than women after college?
In this analysis of College Scorecard data, yes, on average and at the great majority of schools. Men out-earned women at 3,384 of the 3,576 institutions that report both figures, with an average gap of $6,329, or 16.8 percent. The data measures earnings about six years after students first enrolled and reflects field of study, hours worked, and early-career timing rather than pay for the same job.
Does choosing a different college close the gender pay gap?
Far less than most people expect. The gap appears at roughly 95 percent of schools, so it is not something you can dodge by picking a particular campus. What moves earnings most is the field of study and the structure of early-career work, both of which sit outside the college's control. Picking a higher-earning field changes the picture more than picking a different school.
Why is the gap so consistent across schools?
Because the main drivers are not school-specific. Men and women still enroll in different fields at different rates, and high-paying fields skew male at most institutions. That alone widens the average gap nearly everywhere. Differences in hours worked and time out of the workforce add to it. The pattern repeats across schools because its causes are nationwide, not local.
Does this mean colleges pay women less for the same work?
No. The data is a school-level average across every graduate and every field, not a comparison of men and women in the same job. It cannot isolate equal-pay-for-equal-work. The gap shown here mostly reflects what students study and how much they work after graduating, not how a college or an employer pays a specific role.
Will the gap stay 16.8 percent as graduates get older?
We do not know from this data, because it is a single early-career snapshot taken about six years after enrollment. Early-career earnings are volatile and reflect first jobs. The gap could widen or narrow over the following decade depending on field choices, promotions, and time worked. The figure describes a starting line, not a career outcome.
Which students are included in these earnings figures?
Only students who received federal Title IV financial aid, such as Pell Grants or federal student loans. Students who paid fully out of pocket or with private scholarships are not counted. That makes the figures representative of aided students rather than every person who attended.
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Footnotes
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U.S. Department of Education. (2026). College Scorecard. https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/ ↩
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National Center for Education Statistics. (2024). Digest of Education Statistics. NCES, U.S. Department of Education. https://nces.ed.gov/ ↩
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U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2024). Highlights of Women's Earnings. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.bls.gov/ ↩