The Higher Education of Centenarian Women

A new report from the U.S. Census Bureau offers a look at the nation’s population over the age of 100. The data shows that in 2011 there were 44,644 women over the age of 100 in the United States compared with just 10,312 men. Thus, women made up 81.2 percent of the centenarian population.

Women in this group who were over the age of 100 in 2011 were born in 1911 or earlier. This was an era where very few women obtained a higher education. The data shows that 42.6 percent of the centenarian women did not complete high school. Another 28.5 percent completed high school but did not attend college. But 28.9 percent of these 100-year-old women had some college experience and 13.5 percent were college graduates. It may well be that many of these women attended college later in life and were not traditional-age college students. If they had gone to college at the traditional age, for many of these women it would have been at the onset of the Great Depression.

For 100-year-old men in 2011, 21.3 percent were college graduates.

The Census report, The Centenarian Population: 2007-2011, may be downloaded by clicking here.