When it comes to graduation rates, the girls are schooling the boys, according to a new study from the Manhattan Institute. The study found that not only are girls in the nation's 100 largest school districts graduating at a 72 percent rate versus 65 percent for their male counterparts, but that the gender gap is even wider among minority students.

The news comes amid recent reports that fully one-third of high school students are not completing their studies. According to the Manhattan Institute study, "Leaving Boys Behind: Public High School Graduation Rates," the overall national public school graduation rate for the class of 2003 was relatively steady at 70 percent, with white students graduating at a rate of 78 percent while Asian students came in at 72 percent, blacks at 55 percent and Hispanics at 53 percent. But among black and Hispanic populations, the gender gap was wider, with 59 percent of black female students graduating, compared to only 48 percent of their male counterparts and a 58 to 49 percent ratio for Hispanic females and males, respectively.

While the report doesn't tackle why this gender gap exists, co-author Marcus Winters said it does help to highlight what he called the "horribly low" graduation rates for minority students. "It especially points out this gender gap and in order to fix the situation, you have to agree that there's a problem, which I think this study points out," said Winters.

Though the overall graduation rate numbers are not significantly different from figures that Winters and his colleagues have been seeing for more than a decade, the ability to break the numbers down by gender is new and it was the key to finding the male/female gap. "The overall rates have been consistent for a while," Winters said. "But the gender calculations are new and interesting because a lot of people have the idea that girls do better in general, but we were interested in this gender gap between white, African American and Hispanic students."

Winters said it would take a completely different kind of study to explore why the minority gender gap exists, but he does have a few ideas, based on his "push/pull" theories. "In one sense, minority males are more likely to be pulled out of school because they find short-term opportunities in the labor market that are appealing to them," he said, citing jobs such as construction and, for some males, the underground drug trade in big cities.

"But they may also be pushed out in a different way with some teachers seeming particularly threatened by them, leading to some educators giving up on them a bit quicker than female or white students."

And you can stop the New Jersey jokes, because the Garden State had the highest overall graduation rate at 88 percent, followed by Iowa, Wisconsin, and North Dakota, with 85 percent each. Bringing up the rear with the lowest overall graduation rates were South Carolina (54 percent), Georgia (56 percent) and New York (58 percent).

There is, however, a dissenting voice on this thorny topic, according to a New York Times report. A fellow researcher, Lawrence Mishel of the Economic Policy Institute, agrees that black and Hispanic graduation rates are disturbingly low, but he said the Manhattan Institute study seriously exaggerates the problem.

In a recent article by Mishel in Education Week, he estimated that 73 percent of black students get high school diplomas, based on data from census surveys, citing studies from cites New York City and Florida that find graduation rates at least 10 percentage points higher than the Manhattan Institute study. (Winters and his co-author, Jay Greene, address the discrepancy with Mishel's findings in their study.)

While Mishel says high school graduation rates have been slowly improving, especially among blacks, Winters argues that they've remained flat for years. The difference is, in part, due to the two researchers using different sets of data for their findings, but Harvard economics professor Claudia Goldin told the Times that the truth probably lies "somewhere in between."