With the imminent farewell to our seniors looming in the near future, STA’s oldest students are leaving behind their plaid-skirted world and will soon enter their college lives.

For them, and all other women seeking further education, the Associated Press has some good news.

Female college graduates exceed the number of male graduates earning advanced and bachelor’s degrees, for the first time ever.

From the age 25 and older, around 10.6 million women in comparison to 10.5 million men have achieved master’s degrees or higher.

This new finding relates directly to the changing standard of which parent stays home and which works outside of the home. Now, around one in five families has a stay-at-home father as the primary caregiver.

Yet women still make only 78.2 percent of what men do working full time, while a depressing figure, it is an increase of 13.8 percent in the past 10 years.

With these new findings, some confusion arises.

Since 2002, women have made up only 15-16 percent of the top management in the corporate world.

If more women qualify for these positions with their advanced degrees, why does that figure still hold true?

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg addresses answers to this question in a TED talk she gave last December.

She gives three pieces of advice to combat the statistics and encourage women to achieve the success they want.

1. Sit at the table

Women ‘systematically underestimate’ themselves, Sandberg asserts. Of all the men entering the work force from college, 57 percent negotiate their first salaries when only 7 percent of women do.

Furthermore, women attribute their success to other factors, where men attribute it to their own merit. Sandberg argues that successful men are seen as more likable than successful women. Finally, Sandberg notes that men reach for more opportunities than women.

2. Make your partner a real partner

If a couple both work and have a child, women still do twice the amount of housework the man does and three times the amount of child care. Sandberg suggests that our society puts more pressure on boys to succeed than girls.

3. Don’t leave before you leave

Once a woman begins to start thinking about having a child, she realizes she needs to make room in her busy life and begins to step back from her work. The issue Sandberg sees with this is that women start this thought process much earlier than their actual pregnancy, like when they become engaged, get married or sometimes before they’re even dating someone seriously.

Jobs need to be engaging and rewarding to tempt women to come back to them after they have a child. If in that early pre-planning time when women step back from their work they missed opportunities for promotions or projects, the job they return to could bore them.

Sandberg encourages all women to stay engaged and motivated in their work until they absolutely must go on leave and then to decide whether to ultimately stay home with the child or return.

‘I think a world that was run where half of our countries and half of our companies were run by women would be a better world,’ Sheryl concludes.