The Rise of the College Woman

[DominusTecum]

The Rise of the College Woman

by Tamim Ansary

 

Last February I went to a community college in Arizona to deliver some lectures about Afghanistan. Every classroom I visited had about 20 women and 10 or fewer men. I wanted to know what this was about: Were my topics keeping men away? Had extra women flocked in from other classes? Was it my movie-star good looks?

The professor shook her head. None of the above, she declared. "You're simply looking at the demographic reality of today's colleges. A lot more women are signing up than men. We don't know why, but these days, young men are tending to go right into the workforce after high school. They want to start earning money and don't feel they need college. It's a concern."

Her revelation reminded me of something. After a column I wrote recently about the benefits of college, I got a spate of e-mails from men disputing my assertions. They claimed they had gotten perfectly good jobs without college. One was a chef. Another was a car mechanic. Both were making more money than classmates who had opted for college. Another said he was making less, but he wasn't carrying a load of debt, either. He figured he'd use the money he might have spent paying back college loans to invest in real estate and thus come out ahead in the end.

These were not aimless slackers who skipped college 'cause they forgot to apply. These fellows made a deliberate and considered choice not to go.

 

College admissions experts have been aware of this trend for some years now. I'm told unofficially that they've been casting about for ways to attract more male applicants. That's right: affirmative action for men. You'll never hear the phrase spoken out loud, of course, but the buzz is there.

Look at the numbers
Women first outnumbered men in colleges and universities in the mid-1970s. By 1997, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, this country's total college population stood at 44 percent male, 56 percent female.

In the 1990s, the number of B.A.s earned by men rose by 8 percent. The number earned by women rose by 28 percent. In that same decade, the number of men enrolled in graduate programs went up 22 percent, but the number of women increased 66 percent. The number of part-time college students went up 1 percent among males, and 17 percent among females.

Since 1997, the trend has only accelerated. By 2009, predicts the National Center for Education Statistics, the male-to-female ratio within the college population will reach 39 to 61 percent.

 

Wow. The downstream consequences of this demographic reality seem obvious to me. After all, research unrelated to gender proclaims the following formula quite definitively:
More College = More Money + More Power.

If that's true, 30 years from now women will be making most of the money and they'll be running society.

That would certainly mark a turning point for civilization. Despite Greek legends about Amazons and anthropological reports of the occasional matriarchal tribe such as the Iroquois, no major society in recorded history has seen true parity of money and power between men and women. The United States would be the first.

 

On the other hand ...
Women have outnumbered men in college for almost 40 years now, yet they still earn about 75 cents for every dollar earned by men in comparable jobs. Obviously there's a gap between what college enables and what society allows.

Personally, I think that gap can't last. Still, social change is a tricky business. Cause-and-effect predictions are difficult because dozens of causes, most of them hidden, operate in every situation.

For example, studies show that high-status women prefer to date even higher-status men. Guys who skipped college in their youth might swell the herds heading back to school in middle age. You know--just so they can get dates.

And there's another monkey wrench rattling around in the works. When people talk about all the extra money and power a college degree can get you, they're mostly talking about technical or business degrees--about scientists and engineers. Or they're comparing the earnings of business executives who have M.B.A.s versus those who don't.

Women, despite their enthusiasm for college, are not going into technical fields. They earn, for example, only 20 percent of the engineering degrees conferred in this country each year. And they're way underrepresented in M.B.A. programs.

Closing two gaps with one blow
That famous engineering gap between the United States and certain Asian countries, the source of so much handwringing in the United States, may simply boil down to a gender gap within this country. Close the second gap and the first may disappear.

 

In other words, maybe we can't end our engineer shortage by pouring thousands of new science and math teachers into classrooms where half the students have no interest in science or math. Those kids won't get interested just because they're surrounded by teachers throwing homework at them.

We might do better to explore strategies for getting girls interested in hard science at an early age. Do certain instructional strategies work better with girls than boys? Do we need more mentoring programs? Or more role models? Perhaps we should coax female engineers out of the field and into education. Maybe we need TV shows about heroic female engineers. Agent 00101001. License to Drill (for oil). Software Barbie? (I'm just thinking out loud.)

The point is to draw more females into technical fields--not drive, herd, or force them, but draw them in, lure them in, intrigue them in, inspire them in. If we do, demographics might yet prove to be that force that transforms society.

 

 

 

This is interesting... I didn't care much for the last half or so of the article, which just seemed to be a spiel about how the US (his words, but it will really be the entire western world) is becoming a matriarchal society and how we need to entice all these girls into engineering so they can make more and truly replace the men.

 

The first bit, on the other hand, was quite intriguing. Men don't want to go to college today because more are waking up to the fact that it's A) a racket, and B) not necessarily necessary to secure a job to support a family (or live hedonistic lifestyles as many of today's men probably prefer to do.) Women, on the other hand, are only entering college because they are being propagandized into doing so, or forced by their feminist mothers and parents, or perhaps because they're rather feministic themselves and feel that it's their rightful place. Most of them, however, are simply well-meaning and figure "why not." Based on my experiences, I tend to think that they view it as a sort of matchmaking service. Regardless, it's most interesting how all these men are finding jobs, but yet the article ignores this and keeps repeating mantra-like "must go to college, universal college is good, ad infinitum."

[Vandaler]

The first bit, on the other hand, was quite intriguing. Men don't want to go to college today because more are waking up to the fact that it's A) a racket, and B) not necessarily necessary to secure a job to support a family (or live hedonistic lifestyles as many of today's men probably prefer to do.) Women, on the other hand, are only entering college because they are being propagandized into doing so, or forced by their feminist mothers and parents, or perhaps because they're rather feministic themselves and feel that it's their rightful place. Most of them, however, are simply well-meaning and figure "why not." Based on my experiences, I tend to think that they view it as a sort of matchmaking service. Regardless, it's most interesting how all these men are finding jobs, but yet the article ignores this and keeps repeating mantra-like "must go to college, universal college is good, ad infinitum."

 

I may be misunderstanding the essence of what your saying, but I disagree profoundly with "...Men don't want to go to college today because more are waking up to the fact that it's A) a racket, and B) not necessarily necessary to secure a job to support a family "

 

Securing a job to support a family is certainly a dignified thing to do, but without education, your bound to be doing only what job your able to find.

Considering you spend more then half your life at work, is it not worth it to educate yourself to be doing something you love, or at least, provide your family with the security that your education provide for job continuity?  Education empowers you to make choice in your carreer, without education, your are bound by what you find.  

 

At the very least, if you don't want to go to college, you need to learn a craft or something... 

 

Edited to add: Your still young... Learn from your elder.

 

You will ear often older folks say how they regret not going to college.

You almost never ear someone is his older age regretting he went.

[Sophia]

 is it not worth it to educate yourself to be doing something you love, or at least, provide your family with the security that your education provide for job continuity? 

 

Yes, but the sad fact remains that most college education is overpriced drivel.  The first two years of undergrad work are nothing but remedial highschool education anyway...why would anyone want to pay $20,000 a year for that?  Then you spend two years on your "major" which, if you really intend to go on to find a job in that field, necessitates a masters in the same.  Six or seven years spent amassing tons of debt, learning very little, when he could have been spending the time doing something he really enjoyed, without tons of debt!

 

At the very least, if you don't want to go to college, you need to learn a craft or something...

 

Definitely.  There should be more trade schools, and I think that this can be started as early as highschool. 

[Vandaler]

 

 is it not worth it to educate yourself to be doing something you love, or at least, provide your family with the security that your education provide for job continuity? 

 

Yes, but the sad fact remains that most college education is overpriced drivel.  The first two years of undergrad work are nothing but remedial highschool education anyway...why would anyone want to pay $20,000 a year for that?  Then you spend two years on your "major" which, if you really intend to go on to find a job in that field, necessitates a masters in the same.  Six or seven years spent amassing tons of debt, learning very little, when he could have been spending the time doing something he really enjoyed, without tons of debt!

 

At the very least, if you don't want to go to college, you need to learn a craft or something...

 

Definitely.  There should be more trade schools, and I think that this can be started as early as highschool. 

 

Good point on pricing,  In Canada, education is far more affordable.  It's not even comparable.

[Traditio_in_Radice]

 

Good point on pricing,  In Canada, education is far more affordable.  It's not even comparable.

A lot of it is still overpriced drivel. A B.A. isn't worth the paper it's printed on but will still run you around $10,000 if you live at home with parents. And even if a Canadian university grad comes out with less debt load, he's faced with much higher taxes than in the U.S. (and mortgages are not tax deductable here, either).

[Vandaler]

 

Good point on pricing,  In Canada, education is far more affordable.  It's not even comparable.

A lot of it is still overpriced drivel. A B.A. isn't worth the paper it's printed on but will still run you around $10,000 if you live at home with parents. And even if a Canadian university grad comes out with less debt load, he's faced with much higher taxes than in the U.S. (and mortgages are not tax deductable here, either).

 

There will be soon a shortage in manual labour, so, there is nothing wrong in learning a trade if that is what a younglin want.

 

However, I would certainly not persuade my son in thinking that education is a scam, thus limiting his possibilities.  In fact, I'd knock flat (figuratively) anyone convincing him otherwise.

[Sophia]

However, I would certainly not persuade my son in thinking that education is a scam, thus limiting his possibilities.  In fact, I'd knock flat (figuratively) anyone convincing him otherwise.

 

It's not that education is a scam, it's the kind of education being offered that is inferior.

[Vandaler]

It's not that education is a scam, it's the kind of education being offered that is inferior.

 

I don't really care for that line of reasoning... If my son... or your son, wants to design bridges rather then build them, he should be encouraged to pursue is endevior to the fullest of his desire and not be brought down into thinking that designing the bridge is not for him.

 

Sorry if I'm a bit dry, this subject is close to my sensibilities.

[DominusTecum]

Oh no, we don't mean that... I agree, being an architect as opposed to a construction worker is perfectly fine, if that's what God calls you to do, you enjoy, and you can make a living at it. However, the sad thing is that most of the education that is offered today is very very mediocre. What the boy could learn in perhaps two or three years of dedicated study takes him seven, because he's also required to take so many irrelevant classes. The liberal arts are a great thing, for some people, but they are not made for everyone. It used to be that only around five percent of post-high school students went to college, and those 5 percent were the ones who were really qualified for it, and who could stand to benefit from a college education. As it is now, the educational system is very bloated and overpriced. I paid $10,000 (that is cheap in America) for a year of college last year, in which I took precisely one class that taught me things that I did not learn in high school. The rest was required rehashing, and was merely an excuse for them to coax me out of a whole lot of tuition and class fees. The classes at a modern university are very much dumbed down, so that anyone and everyone can come, take them, and get their "bachelors." This naturally creates a problem, because the glut of bachelors' degrees means that the jobs formerly accessible with it (truly professional jobs) now require a masters or even a doctorate. It's not unheard-of here for students to spend 7 or even 10 years in school, and then when they get out they face massive debt and they've wasted the first decade of their adult life and have very little to show for it, save a couple of diplomas.

[Vandaler]