Giving Compass' Take:

• Julia Piper explains the causes of and potential solutions to the gender gap in student debt that disproportionately hurts women. 

• How can funders help women get an education without unmanageable debt? How does the gender pay gap exacerbate this problem? 

• Learn about the gender pay gap. 

Lately, much of the worry about whether colleges have fallen short with one gender has concentrated on men, who do not attend or succeed in college at the rates that women do.

But how well colleges serve women is surfacing as another major concern. Even though they dominate in college enrollment and have higher six-year graduation rates, they are not reaping the same financial rewards from finishing college, or from earning more-advanced degrees, that men do. In May, the American Association of University Women called national attention to the issue when it reported that women hold almost two-thirds of the nation’s student-loan debt, nearly $900 billion of the $1.4 trillion total, with black women holding the highest average debt of any racial, ethnic, and gender group among graduates who completed bachelor’s degrees.

One factor contributing to the disproportionate debt load is that women are more likely to attend colleges with higher costs than are men. Almost twice as many women as men attended for-profit colleges in 2016, for instance. Gault points to the aggressive online recruiting of women by for-profit colleges, with their emphasis on the more-convenient structure for people with children, a need more common to female students than male.

"We need to be able to encourage women to go into relatively high-paying graduate fields or graduate programs at the same rates that men are, and there are a number of fields where that’s not happening," says Gault.

Read the full article about the gender gap in students debt by Julia Piper at The Chronicle of Philanthropy.