Dietetics senior Jenny Heringhausen said she's made the dean's list every semester since she began classes at MSU, yet rarely stresses over getting good grades.

"I guess when you think about grades, the only time when I was nervous was the very first semester," she said.

After returning from a study abroad trip to London, Rome and Paris earlier this summer, Heringhausen said she began focusing on building her résumé — something she will need for the internship all dietetics majors must have after graduation.

Heringhausen's college success is an example of a larger trend at MSU, in the U.S. and in most places around the world, where it appears women have pulled ahead of men in undergraduate college enrollment numbers and grade point averages.

Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education, has studied the gender imbalance in colleges for 16 years.

"Boys are arriving at college unprepared, unfocused and unmotivated, and it's so easy to make a comparison with how focused and prepared and motivated the girls are," he said.

Since 2000, female undergraduates have had a higher average grade point average, or GPA, every fall and spring semester except in the College of Nursing in spring 2003 and in the College of Engineering in fall 2003. There were, however, more instances of males having higher GPAs during the summer semesters.

For the past five years, women have also made up about 54 percent of the total number of full-time undergraduates, according to the Office of Planning and Budgets.

Heringhausen said the dietetics program is particularly full of high-achieving females.

"I've noticed in my major, especially, girls are very hard-core about their work — it's a very competitive field," she said.

In 2004, there were 2.5 million more women enrolled in higher education institutions than men in the U.S., Mortenson said. In undergraduate enrollment, women make up 55 percent of white, Hispanic and Asian students, he said. The gap between black women and men is larger — 65 to 35 percent, Mortenson said.

While the gap gets smaller in people pursuing master's degrees or doctorates, more women have graduated with bachelor's degrees than men since 1981. In 2004, about 200,000 more women earned bachelor's degrees than men in the U.S., Mortenson said.

Heringhausen said she's noticed it's less socially acceptable for guys to stay home and study than for girls to do the same.

"(Men's) extracurricular activities take away from their study time, whereas girls go and study in groups — I don't see guys studying in groups nearly as often at the library," she said.

The College of Engineering was the only college at MSU during the spring 2006 semester in which men outnumbered women. But it was also the biggest gender gap within any college, with four times more men as women, according to the Office of the Registrar's Web site.

Mortenson said the trend reaches much farther than U.S. colleges.

"It's really quite dramatic," Mortenson said. "There are more women in higher education in every country in the world except Sub-Saharan Africa, where poverty seems to be holding them back."

Nutritional science senior Nick Schroeder said he thinks men may be more focused on getting a job rather than taking each of their classes as seriously as women do.

"I think girls are more likely to take the college thing seriously," he said. "Guys might feel it's easier for men to succeed in today's society, and they don't have to work as hard — guys are more job-oriented."

Schroeder has been a member of the Honors College since his freshman year and plans to go to medical school. He is also a math teaching assistant and will be a member of the Natural Science Dean's advisory committee in the fall.

Still, Schroeder said he has noticed differences between men's and women's approaches to school.

"Based on my friends, girls stick to their resolution to study hard — guys will be more easily distracted," he said.

International relations and psychology junior Monica Mukerjee is a member of the Honors College, both Model U.N. organizations at MSU, and volunteers at the Listening Ear Crisis Hotline — but said all her extracurricular activities are done more for enjoyment than to get ahead.

"My friends always tell me that I am really ambitious, but I just do what I like to do. ... I really don't see a line between work and play. ... I am just passionate about a lot of things," she said.

Mukerjee said she thinks researchers could find out the reasons behind women's drives to have a good career if they actually asked women, instead of just comparing the gender percentages in college.

"I have a hard time believing just because we are both female means we are going for a degree for the same reasons."

Mortenson said that by the time men reach college, they may have long found school an uninteresting place because the K-12 system is better suited for girls.

"Because of maturity levels, boys start to realize that the way they experience education is somewhere between boring and a huge turnoff," Mortenson said.

Jim Cotter, senior associate director of admissions, said another reason may be that a large portion of men used to be able to make a living without a college education.

"We're in a state where far more people don't have college degrees than those who do," Cotter said. "When you look at the role models in young men's lives, they spent their lives in manufacturing jobs or on farms."

Mortenson said during the past decades the economy has shifted away from manufacturing and farming being the most profitable industries, and toward the health and education industries — areas that women readily participate in.

"Women have caught on to this and have been taking advantage of it for decades, and the men just don't seem to get it," he said.

Despite being behind women in some respects, Mukerjee said she doesn't think men's lower average enrollment numbers and GPAs mean they are any less intelligent.

"If (guys) are playing video games all the time and they are still getting a three-point, that's pretty good — let's not undermine that intellect," she said.

Ultimately though, men may need to help themselves catch up, Mukerjee said.

"If it's just as simple as 'guys are being lazy,' I don't think there is going to be anything the university can do," she said. "Can you ban Halo? I don't think so."