New Theory or Excuse?
Here is an article from Inside Higher Ed on a "new take" on the gender gap in colleges. I thought this litte know factoid was relevant:
So, if male and female enrollments were roughly equal from 1900-1930--where is all the discrimination against women in public education that feminists keep talking about from that era? I thought women were home barefoot and pregnant.
Update: I understand very well that women were discriminated against in earlier times and had trouble using their credentials to get ahead in many professions. However, the point of this post is to reveal the hypocrisy that the researchers at Harvard are using when they use the fact that equal numbers of women and men attended college in earlier times as an excuse--oops, I mean "theory" as to why there is a gender gap in education now. In other words--nothing to worry about for men--they never attended college that much anyway so why worry if they don't now. If you really want to know how the Harvard researchers feel about men in college, take a look at this paragraph:
Now, turn that paragraph around and imagine how sexist it would sound if we said men do better at high school and women have behavioral problems. The question if women were down to 40% of college students would be, "what can we do to change that?" not, how can we make it seem normal that men don't attend college so that we don't have to do anything to change it?
The study starts with a review of the long-term trends in gender enrollment and notes a fact that has received relatively little attention of late: Between 1900 and 1930, male and female enrollments were roughly at parity. And relatively few of the women enrolled (about 5 percent) were at elite women’s colleges. About half were at public institutions.
So, if male and female enrollments were roughly equal from 1900-1930--where is all the discrimination against women in public education that feminists keep talking about from that era? I thought women were home barefoot and pregnant.
Update: I understand very well that women were discriminated against in earlier times and had trouble using their credentials to get ahead in many professions. However, the point of this post is to reveal the hypocrisy that the researchers at Harvard are using when they use the fact that equal numbers of women and men attended college in earlier times as an excuse--oops, I mean "theory" as to why there is a gender gap in education now. In other words--nothing to worry about for men--they never attended college that much anyway so why worry if they don't now. If you really want to know how the Harvard researchers feel about men in college, take a look at this paragraph:
The other major factor they cite is also very simple: Women do better in high school. They are more likely to study hard, to take the right courses, and to do well in those courses than are their male counterparts. Male high school students are more likely to have behavioral problems.
Now, turn that paragraph around and imagine how sexist it would sound if we said men do better at high school and women have behavioral problems. The question if women were down to 40% of college students would be, "what can we do to change that?" not, how can we make it seem normal that men don't attend college so that we don't have to do anything to change it?
posted by Helen at 10:10 AM
45 Comments:
On my mother's side of the family, it was considered more important for the women to go to college. After all, the sons could work for the family business or on the family farm. (They're from the western part of Tennessee--a little town called Lexington.) Most of the men that went to college tended to end up in the professions, i.e. pharmacists, physicians (grandpa worked his way through med school by being a pharmacist), law, dentistry.
I remember those days. In California a girl could always get into one of the state colleges, at the very least. You could be a nurse or a teacher.
What was different though was people's tendency to let you off the hook--a counselor saying "well you'll probably get married so why bother with trig" and waffling, indecisive girls like me took it to heart. The strongest and most stubborn women could always blow off these turkeys however and go for what they wanted, even in the 1950s.
I think the feminists wanted the system to strengthen their spines for them so they didn't have to come off as pushy and egotistic themselves.
Of course I never wanted to be a nurse or a teacher. Anything but that! Now I am in job hell, and think nursing or teaching might have been a good way to go after all.
where is all the discrimination of women in public education that feminists keep talking about from that era?
I'm guessing that it didn't really exist, but I also suppose that going to college back then wasn't considered as important or necessary for the average person then as it is now. I'm guessing that, back then, it was only really the rich kids going to college, so gender was less of an issue that class. The rich kids went, regardless of gender, and the poor kids didn't.
I guess Thomas Sowell is right:
"The grand fallacy of our times is that various groups would be equally represented in institutions and occupations if it were not for discrimination. "
Sorry, bad link. Here's a good one (I hope): http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=3807
So, if male and female enrollments were roughly equal from 1900-1930--where is all the discrimination of women in public education that feminists keep talking about from that era? I thought women were home barefoot and pregnant.
Most of them were. Here is a draft of the NBER paper. The chart on page 24 shows that only 5% of men or women born in 1890 graduated from college. Most of the other 95% of the women stayed home and had children. Most of the other 95% of the men took jobs. Which is also what happened to most of the men and women who graduated from college too. A lot of the women got an "MRS" degree in college and never had much of a career.
In fact, despite the supposed crisis of more women than men going to college, men still get payed more than women on average. A poorly educated man still has some decent chance of employment, for example as a construction worker. A poorly educated woman has virtually no chance at any worthwhile career. If more men than women go to college, that partly — but not completely — makes up for what happens in the job market.
If you expect men and women to have equal influence in society, then the pay differential, not college attendance, is the real issue. And if you don't expect them to have equal influence, so what if more women than men go to college? Either way, high female college attendance is not a problem.
After all, college is voluntary, so from a libertarian perspective, it's their own business. The one involuntary institution that hits men harder than women is prison. One of the reasons that more women than men are in college is that some of the men are in prison. It is sad, and in my view unfair and unnatural, that fully a quarter as many men in the United States are in prison as in college. If you count the men and women who are either in college or in prison, the numbers are about equal and slightly tilt towards the men.
Helen said -
So, if male and female enrollments were roughly equal from 1900-1930--where is all the discrimination of women in public education that feminists keep talking about from that era? I thought women were home barefoot and pregnant.
:O Are you saying that the social carnage of the past 4 decades has been based on - (gasp!!) - a hoax!?!?!?!?!
Say it ain't so, Betty, Kate, Gloria, Germaine, Robin, Andrea, Catherine, Ti Grace, bell, Sheila, Simone! :((
To see the bias, you must also look at the areas in which women were discouraged. My maternal grandmother attended a "normal" college - that is, a public institution that trained teachers(nearly all of whom were women); their teaching certificate was not the same as a bachelor's degree. It was a far different institution than the college my grandfather (her husband) attended, in which he studied four years to become an engineer. My mother also became a teacher, but she attended a co-ed four-year college in the '50s. She was one of a handful of female math majors, but experienced little of the sexism that previous women did.
Greg,
I tend to agree with you that there is no crisis with more women attending college than men, for two reasons: First, it's getting to the point that having a college degree simply isn't really all that impressive, and many people would be better off financially and in work experience working for those 4+ years rather than racking up student loan only to get a job that doesn't really require a college degree anyway, as several of my friends have done.
Second, to this day, women are still mostly majoring in fields such as education and psychology. Nothing wrong with that, but teachers have a rather limited pay potential, and psychology majors have fairly limited career options unless they go to grad school, in which there are limited openings available. So I don't think we're going to have a society where the women are footing the bills for the men anytime soon (And I certainly hope we don't because it's been my experience that there are very few women willing to foot the bills for men. We'd be screwed.)
I will disagree with one thing though: the pay differential between men and women has little to do with being influential. Women more often take jobs that pay less so that they can work in a more pleasant, safer environment at a job they enjoy. Men tend to take jobs that pay better regardless of environment or whether or not they enjoy them. I don't know what this says about influence, but I will say that I would rather be in the position to turn down a higher paying job for a lower paying job that I enjoyed, than in the opposite position.
Anyway, if wealth conveys influence, it's who controls the wealth (i.e., women on average), not who earns it. But I don't really think that being wealthy and being influential are synonymous.
I'm dissapointed in the facile nature of your query.
FWIW, all the women in my family (from Tennessee, if it matters) from the turn of the century on graduated from college.
The last two generations had real careers, with the generation before that heavily involved in running farms and businesses...two of my great-granmothers were widowed early and by necessity became providers for their families.
But your nasty crack "where was all the discrimination" annoys me. The discrimination was in the expectations and limitations set upon what a woman could do with her higher education, once she aquired it. For many women of the era you refer and prior, being an "accomplished" woman was requisite to a good marriage, something added to the pedigree and to family prestige.
Women who wanted to USE their education were rather frustrated. The number of professions really open to women was a short list. Biology was destiny. Marriage meant children, and children meant motherhood, and motherhood limited women's options.
Can you really be so clueless as to the discrimination women who wanted to go into male-track careers faced? Only a generation ago able women were being heavily discouraged from persuing law or medical degrees. The idea that a married woman should seek to displace a deserving young man from medical school was an affront to some colleges. My mother would have been a doctor but for her sex. She went into a science career...but mostly taught.
You seem to have no idea of the obstacles placed in the way of women who wanted professional careers, or simply even to use the education they received in any meaningful way outside of the family circle. LIfe really was a fricking JOhn Cheever story for educated women in the twenties and thirties.
You are about my age so I am surprised at your amnesia about what the world was like for women even in the mid-to-late sixties.
My sister inlaw, a boomer baby, was told as a child by her father that she could not be a lawyer like him. She could be a nurse or a teacher. Period.
My Grandmothers taught - one was a high school teacher and eventually a professor at UT, the other taught higher math in high school. If they had been born in my generation, they would have been doing something else.
The discrimination may not have been in admissions...but what women were expected to learn and do with that education was very, very different from what they are expected to do with education today.
Hmmm, thoughtful comments, and thought provoking. I am a humanist, and I accept that women have been injured and held back by societal ills and prejudice. I am NOT a feminist because I also see the damage that this does and has done to men. Men set the rules, but the rules hurt them as well, and they still do.
It is similar in terms of racial bigotry. Slavery and Jim Crow were aimed at hurting and exploiting minorities, and they did. But it also hurt the majority culture as well. America is hurt by racism, it is an evil which is insidious. Sexism is as well, so I see it as a both/and issue.
Trey
Rizzo: The pay differential between men and women has little to do with being influential.
It is a contradictory and unconvincing message, to declare first that America is the best because it's the richest and most capitalist — look at how much better it's doing than Sweden — and then turn around and claim that money isn't influence. Not that I'm accusing you personally on this, but both of these are convenient messages from people in the top 1% income bracket to the other 99%.
America is capitalist and money is influence. The book that Helen once cited, "The Millionaire Next Door", rather let the cat out of the bag about money, and the position of most women relative to it too. It described a world of millionaires and millionaires' wives — not spouses of both sexes, just wives. It had the chutzpah to explain that the millionaires can't convince their wives to spend money. If you're the wife of a millionaire, virtue is keeping your hands off of your husband's wad.
For the record, my wife makes about as much money as I do, and she does our taxes too, and I just wouldn't respect her if she didn't want to bring home the bacon.
Greg has a good point that pre-1930 many people didn't go to college. According to my uncle's geneology research my father was the first person in his family (not just immediate family but going back to pre-Revolutionary War ancestors) to graduate from college (1948). Five of his six kids graduated.
I disagree with the "earnings" potential argument, i.e. men can earn as much without a college degree. Construction work is hard, intermittent and dangerous. You may do well for a few years but over a lifetime it's not a good bet. The same is true for many other non-degree jobs. I know plenty of people who earn more than I in factories, mines, etc. but they have to work many hours of overtime and endure much more hazardous conditions to do it. My greatest work hazards are eye strain and carpal tunnel.
Plus, a college degree opens doors outside the area of your study. I've worked outside of the areas I majored in 75% of the time since I received my M.S.
Anon. 12:13, You can't necessarily generalize your sister-in-law's experience. My sister is a baby boomer (born 1948) and she is a lawyer. Many of her female friends from high school also became successful professionals.
I wonder how much of the perception of gender imbalance from the 50s is really just the natural result of the GI bill.
I disagree with the "earnings" potential argument, i.e. men can earn as much without a college degree.
I didn't say "as much". The argument is that a man without a college degree (but with some connections or work ethic) can earn much more than a woman without a college degree. A man with a college degree earns merely somewhat more on average than a woman with a college degree. This is so even if the woman with a college degree earns more than the man without one. Therefore women have more incentive to go college than men.
The only significant exception is men in prison. They don't have any choice.
The problem with all of this is that everyone (including me)has an ax to grind somewhere.
So, here are some data points. My father's mother (born 1888) was a school teacher until she got married. Then she was a housewife. 11 pregnancies, 4 kids survived past the first few months (6 were born dead), three made it to adulthood. My aunt went to Cornell in the 40s and became a school teacher, then an administrator. Despite the brains, the college degree and the career, she had several proposals of marriage. She turned them all down as her "good friend", Kay, would not have liked it.
My mother's mother did NOT go to college, did run a household of seven children, despite being sick much of the time. She worked hard, thay all did.
My mother went to a major university and got a degree in Chemcial Engineering. In the 40s. She worked at for a couple of years until the end of the war, nepotism and sexism showed her that she was probably going to be working for people not as capable. So she changed her career path and then got married 10 years later.
All my sisters went to college. The oldest studied to teach handicapped children, then raised her own - and is now back working with MRs. My second oldest fought with the guidance counselor at the high school (girls do not become doctors...) and has her PhD and teaches at a University and does research.
The third one, the really, awesomely smart one (I am not kidding), went to college found it boring and now makes money doing transciption, freelance.
My female cousins mostly did NOT go to college, considering it a waste of time. (They did not want to party, get drunk or find a husband). They all work and support themselves - and help out their husbands and kids.
My wife did go to college, but learned more on her own and has run her own business. She is thinking of law school.
There was social pressure for and against, not just going, but what to study - and the pressure to go in the 70s and 80s was every bit as nasty and pointless as the pressure against going in earlier times.
The point is that it is OR SHOULD BE the individuals choice and no one elses.
Of course, most people cannot get that through their heads (myself included - ask my kids....)
On a macro level such as a company or country, I suppose money equates to influence, but I'm not sure that applies to the everyday lives of people so much. For example, I would submit that university professors are more influential than, say, stock brokers, yet stock brokers have the potential to make a great deal more. Additionally, some factory workers likely make more than some university professors, but that doesn't make them more influential.
But when it comes to comparing sexes, as I mentioned above, women control more wealth (largely because men die sooner), so if having money does equate to influence, then women should already be more influential. Money is certainly a factor, but it's not the only one. If the pay rates for men and women suddenly became even, it don't think it would necessarily mean men and women were equally influential, unless that result was obtained by equal gender representation in all fields (which ain't gonna happen any time soon).
Anyway, I guess what I'm saying is that I don't think the pay gap between men and women necessarily means all that much. It might, but I'm not convinced. On an individual level, it's certainly meaningful if you're a female who does the same work, and has the same credentials and tenure as your male counterparts, and you get paid substantially less. But I'm not sure what it means in terms of influence if teachers get paid less, on average, than construction workers, for example.
Rizzo: For example, I would submit that university professors are more influential than, say, stock brokers, yet stock brokers have the potential to make a great deal more.
This is a clever example, which I respect, even if I think that it's a bit exaggerated. But the truth is virtually all of the influence of university faculty that can't be explained by money instead comes from job security. As career prospects go, salary and job security are two different desirables that you gain in roughly the same ways. People with low salaries and no job security have a lot of trouble getting influencing anyone at work, or building a good home life, even if they are university faculty.
A woman who doesn't go to college, and especially a woman who didn't finish high school, is unlikely to make much money, gain job security, or have much influence of any sort in the world. She will probably either have a nothing job like working as a sales clerk, or she will be strongly dependent on a spouse. I really doubt the picture of the unemployable wife who can control her employed husband just by brow-beating him. Usually the husband has to allow it, and even in this day and age a lot of them don't.
So again, the point is that it makes an enormous difference for the personal fulfillment of women if they go to college. It makes a big difference for men too, but it isn't quite that pivotal. The way a lot of men see it, in college you draw a negative salary, when you could be out making money.
Greg wrote: "A woman who doesn't go to college, and especially a woman who didn't finish high school, is unlikely to make much money, gain job security, or have much influence of any sort in the world."
I am with you on the money brother, but I disagree about much influence of any sort in the world. Women are likely to be mothers, the mst influential people in the world. And if my hunch is correct, women who do not finish high school tend to have more children. That makes them more influential. They also, I wager, tend to head single parent homes. Wow. Talk about power and influcence.
I just frightened myself pale. Think of the unconscious power wielded by undereducated, stressd out people. That is truly frightening and may be the cause of many of our problems with the undreclass in America. We know that no father in the home, early pregnancy, and not finishing high school are the most potent predictors (I would say causes) of poverty. But think of the power that mothers have to bless and curse (as a psychologist I talk about this an inordinate amount)and how it is misused by undereducated practioners.
This is not to let the dad's off, if they would not abandon their post the mom and child would be MUCH better of and much healthier in most cases. But it is mom's who engage in early child rearing, where important powerful stuff happens. For good or for ill.
Trey
Greg - I think I get your point. But in looking at Census data, of the people with income, a man with a H.S. degree does not earn as much as a woman with a degree.
At every educational level males earn significantly more than females on the average. Much of this may be due to lifestyle choices such as where I work many women (20 or more), mostly college educated MBA's, choose special work schedules and/or telecommuniting and diminish the chances for advancement. No men have special work schedules, etc.
Exactly why men are decreasingly attending college may be for many reasons. I believe that the educational system, bottom to top, is less hospitable to males than females for one.
I would be very hesitant to suggest in anyway that not pursuing a college education is a good idea for anyone capable of completing college. According to the above Census table a male with a Bachelor's earns 1.68 times a male with a H.S. degree on average. A female with a Bachelor's earns 1.78 times a female with a H.S. degree.
The question if women were down to 40% of college students would be, "what can we do to change that?" not, how can we make it seem normal that men don't attend college so that we don't have to do anything to change it?
I agree with you here. While I’m don’t think getting a college degree is necessarily all that impressive, and shouldn’t be afforded the prestige it often is (how many jobs out there “require” a college degree, any college degree, despite the fact that there is no convincing rationale for this requirement?), I do find it odd that, when the statistics started to favor women, the reaction was completely different. Hell, the “problem” in many universities even now is not how to get more men to enroll, but how to get more women in the so-called “hard sciences.” Odd that they never seem to complain about there not being enough men in education, psychology, sociology, English, etc. (Although, I will say that the male-female ratio in many universities does provide some advantages to the men attending those universities.)
When feminists and others wrote books about how women were short-changed in schools the argument was that the schools were not designed to cater toward girls and that teachers were biased toward boys. But now that it seems to be the other way around, boys have behavioral problems. There’s something wrong with them. But when it was the girls who supposedly weren’t doing so well, no one blamed it on the girls themselves (nor should they have).
Anyway, I personally did pretty well in high school, although not as well as I could have. I got mostly A’s despite never bringing books home. But I hated high school with a passion. I only truly started enjoying school when I got to college, but many of my friends never made it that far. After high school, they wanted no more. So I do think that the way schools are designed frustrates males in such a way that many lose the desire to pursue their education any further.
Here is the problem that I'm having with this whole discussion. Yes, from a libertarian perspective, if more women choose to attend college than men, that's their business. Individual choice and all that. The problem is, the current situation didn't come about because of individual choices; it came about because of a system specifically designed to subvert individual choice. Let's face it, access to reasonably good higher education is a quantity that is rationed, and who gets the rations is largely controlled by the state. For four decades now, the state's stated policy has been one of equal outcomes, which is incompatible with individual choice. The implementation of this policy, as it always is when equal outcomes are demanded, has been one of restricting individual choice: certain groups of people who chose to attend college (namely, white males and Asians) were to be defied in their choices. In some cases, they were just outright excluded; in other cases, the state jiggered the free market to make it expensive enough for them that they chose not to buy that commodity.
So to say that we should now leave it to individual choice is a bit disingenous. However, I would actually be in favor of that, as the least of all bad remedies at this point. (Certainly much better than a policy of "reverse-reverse" discrimination would be. Talk about something that would be utterly screwed up...) But that's not the argument. The argument is that certain people who have benefitted from the previously state-intrusive policy are now demanding that it be kept in place, even though its effect is moving further away from the ostensibly desired goal of equal outcomes. That's the part that's really bothering me.
One other thing I should add: I'm not convinced that women, who are supposed to be the benificiaries of all this, are actually getting a good deal out of it. I need to go dig up the stats again, but from what I've seen, there are a huge number of women whom the education establishment is fobbing off with garbage degrees in "Ethnic Group X Studies" and the like. Then they get out into the job market and discover that their degrees aren't worth the paper they are printed on. So nobody is really getting a good deal out of this... that is, nobody except the tenured professors of Ethnic Group X Studies.
Here is the problem that I'm having with this whole discussion. Yes, from a libertarian perspective, if more women choose to attend college than men, that's their business. Individual choice and all that. The problem is, the current situation didn't come about because of individual choices; it came about because of a system specifically designed to subvert individual choice.
All of this belly-aching about systems and and situations is really un-libertarian. Either you want to go to college or you don't. There isn't any "rationing". Maybe Harvard admissions is rationed, but there are plenty of colleges that will take any reasonably competent applicant. Even any plausibly competent applicant. Many of the smaller liberal-arts colleges are actively putting their thumbs on the scales in favor of men, because they don't want to turn into womens' college. That may be a controversial trend, but it means that no one is keeping men from going to college.
Harvard, by the way, admitted 20 more men than women for the class of 2009.
This discussion reminds me of the Harvard, classics I think, professor's book titled 'Masculinity.' I would be interested in anyone's take on it but understand that one of his points is that 'masculinity' involves risk taking, the uncultured expression of which could be 'behavior problems.'
dadvocate said
According to the above Census table a male with a Bachelor's earns 1.68 times a male with a H.S. degree on average.
Those numbers are somewhat misleading being presented only in the absolute. The cost of the education and the opportunity cost of foregoing 4-7 years of paid employment to spend it drinking beer, playing sports, and having parties where strippers dance are not factored in.
In order to get a more accurate picture, one would need to compare the ROI of a like sum of money put into a different form of investment.
I took the numbers in the table and applied them across the entire working life assuming full time,uninterrupted employment.
A person who graduated HS at age 18, and worked until age 65 at the annual salary given in the table of $31,183 would have earned at age 65 a total of $1,465,601.00. The person with the BA degree, $2,246,406.00, and the one with the graduate or professional degree, $2,797,799.00.
However, the total educational costs for the BA would have been approximately $160,000 and the graduate/professional degree somewhere around $310,000. Deducting these costs from the lifetime earnings, and assuming no interest just to make the calculations simpler, that brings the lifetime net earnings of the BA down to $2,086,406.00, and of the graduate/professional down to $2,487,799.00
If the same amount of money spent on tuition, room, board, and books was instead invested and returned an average rate of 3.5%, the future value of the investments would be $765,997.01 for the cost of the BA and $1,402,436.70 for the cost of the professional/graduate degree.
Not accounting for taxes, this brings the total lifetime earnings of the HS grad to $2,231,598.01 with comparable investment to the BA, and $2,868,037.70 for comparable investment with the grad/prof degree. This puts the HS grad earning $145,192.01 more than the BA and $380,238.70 more than the grad/prof at age 65. Converted to ratios, these are 0.934938098 and 0.867422 respectively, much less than the 1.68 quoted above, and far less than the 2.19 ratio for grad/prof to HS earnings ratio the table would indicate.
With a nominal tax rate of 14% on the differential between the HS+investment earnings as opposed to the degrees, the BA earnings come to $283,760.23 less, a ratio of 0.872844379, and the grad/prof come to $592,940.14 less, or a ratio of 0.793259293.
Now, there are literally hundreds of simplifications and omissions in that analysis, but at least it does does take a more realistic look at the factors of cost of education compared to ROI. Simply thinking a college degree will automatically result in someone making 1.68 times what one would with only a HS diploma is even more simplistic, and omits the largest factor which makes the correlation almost into a fallacy -
the children of high income parents are far more likely to attend college than the children of low income parents, and the children of high income parents are ALSO more likely to be high income themselves, with a far higher correlation than to college attendance.
Gosh, Zed, didn't mean to make you go crazy with analysis.
I worked my way through college, at times working full-time and attending college full-time. Saying that foregoing an income for 4-7 years for myself or any of my other 5 siblings who graduated college would be false. Of course, we did incur, exept for my sister who had a basketball scholarship, the expense but the University of Tennessee was a hell of a lot cheaper in my day than the figures you use.
Plus, as I stated before, just having a college degree has opened opportunities that would not be available to someone with less education.
Greg,
You basic premise is flawed. Women with the same education and the same experience and the same number of years on the job earn the same as men. The data is skewed because of the lifelong impact of job time lost due to child bearing and rearing. Compare the wages of single men to single women in the same job, and there is no statistical differance. Men dominate in construction and construction pays well, but it is also dangerous. I have friend who used to make over $10,000 a summer fishing in Alaska to pay for his college tuition. Those numbers skew the average wage. Jobs like that , however, are one of the main reasons there are more widows and widowers.
dadvocate -
I worked my way through college, too. But, that same college today costs more than 10 times as much as it did when I went there. There are a lot of factors that the college-pimps don't disclose these days. I recently read an article about the effects of college debt on family formation and the trend of parents these days to let their kids take more responsibility for their college debt. Many of today's graduates may be in their mid-30s before they reach the same financial position that I was in almost from the time I graduated.
I go along with the guys here who are pointing out that lack of college may not be nearly as bad for boys as the current chicken-littles make it out to be. For a lot of kids it amounts to extending their adolescence for 4-7 more years with very little direct and long term benefit. A little over 30 years out of law school, less than 25% of my brother's graduating class was still practicing law, and the number of them who said they would recommend that their children go into law was down in the single digits.
I think women got sold a complete bill of goods, and I expect the next couple of decades to be really entertaining as they start to figure that out.
Zed - I agree with everything you say in your last comments except the long term benefits of college. Using Tennessee as an example isn't exactly fair either. It's one of the cheapest state universities in the country.
Your point about a law career is interesting in that for many law is not a great career choice. I remember around the time my sister got her law degree that the newspaper reported in Knoxville starting salaries for attorneys was pathetic. Because of the presence of the law school there was an over supply of attorneys.
I sell going to college hard to my kids. Overwhelmingly the majority of the people I know who have a college degree are wealthier and lead better lifestyles than those that don't. I know this is anecdotal but it would take a lot to convince me otherwise.
it would take a lot to convince me otherwise.
Not gonna try. It's a big country with a lot of people in it - lots of room for variation of experience. Personally, I learned far more from growing up on a farm than I ever learned from 3 college degrees But, they are union cards. At the point in the interview when they day "do you have one?" it makes the answer "yes. Next question."
Today I work for a bloated self-important slug who never finished her first year, but still is confident that she knows everything. The fact that she doesn't makes her really easy to ignore, and totally dependent on me to keep her systems going for her. We have an ugly Mexican standoff going, but I can replace my job and income far easier than she can replace hers.
Zed: "A little over 30 years out of law school, less than 25% of my brother's graduating class was still practicing law, and the number of them who said they would recommend that their children go into law was down in the single digits."
Those are surprising statistics. Are you referring to 25% of your brother's entire graduating class or 25% of your brother's friends from law school? Perhaps the majority of your brother's law school class has retired after working for 30 years. Or could it be that, after 30 years, most of those lawyers had moved into less rigorous work or non-traditional legal careers? There are many lawyers who don't practice in law firms but I would classify as having legal careers, such as law professors, title company lawyers, in-house counsel, etc.
Similarly, regarding the "single digits" stat for their children, was this statistic for the entire graduating class or anecdotal reports from your brother's friends? I've never heard of a law school polling its graduates on what careers they wanted their children to pursue. If your statement is based on comments from your brother's friends, it would still be relevant but I'm not sure how compelling it is. I bet I could find a lot of doctors who don't want their kids to go to med school but that doesn't make medicine a bad career.
The entire class. They did a kind of "Where we were then, where we are now" survey.
Helen said
Now, turn that paragraph around and imagine how sexist it would sound if we said men do better at high school and women have behavioral problems. The question if women were down to 40% of college students would be, "what can we do to change that?" not, how can we make it seem normal that men don't attend college so that we don't have to do anything to change it?
jw said...
What disturbs me is the massive difference between "Girls have a problem" and "Boys have a problem."
If the girls have a problem, almost everyone says "What can we do to fix it?"
If the boys have a problem almost everyone says "Lets argue for the next few years."
The difference is marked and striking.
Women surpassed men in the number of undergraduate degrees way back in the early 1980s, yet a dozen years later the AAUW sounded the alarm that schools were "shortchanging girls" and the war on boys really began in order to beat them down below the level that girls were achieving in general.
This isn't merely "sexist", it is intentional. Take a look at this article by a woman who claims that telling boys they are stupid is fine because if boys are stupid that must mean that girls are "smart." http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2006/Jan/03/il/FP601030304.html
Nine year old boys just trying to figure out how the world works are being betrayed by their own mothers for the benefits of the "sisterhood." I could quote dozens of articles and posts which indicate that this is all "payback" and revenge for the supposed "10,000 years of oppression" that men have vicitmized women with, but what would be the point? As I said, the gender war has become a trench war and no one cares as long as all the casualties are male.
I think most of the complaining about girls being short changed involved math, engineering, and the hard sciences rather than a simple 4 year degree.
It seems to me that there is a question raised that begs to be answered: why only in the period bookended by the Great Depression and Betty Friedan was there a surfeit ;) of males in college?
I would need to research this, but what immediately jumped to mind was this:
GI bill???
Gotta wonder if there weren't a lot of men who might not otherwise have gone to college, but took advantage of the opportunity ... .
And, of course, there were the number who would have gone earlier but instead served in the war.
(Then there is the whole influence of the Great Depression itself.)
Perhaps it was a confluence of factors such as these.
Interesting question.
In other words--nothing to worry about for men--they never attended college that much anyway so why worry if they don't now.
People who are college grads (etc.) who actually hold that attitude may have degrees, but I have to question the quality of their minds.
Education is as education does.
JW,
Good point. People always focus on the men in power but as Scott Adams of Dilbert fame says, "those are other men." A large number of men are average Joes or below average--these are the ones who are having problems, particularly when getting the cultural message that they are the "privileged male" while leading a life of shitty desperation. The descrepancy between how the men feel they should be living and how they actually are leads to depression, suicide or just plain misery.
Of the boys I've met in my son's Boy Scout Troop many plan on going to college, though not all of them feel like they "have to." But I also have two daughters many of whose friends I've met, and I get the feeling that young women now feel somehow "obligated" by their feminists sisters to go to college no matter what they really want to do with thier lives.
I suspect that college is being seen by high school boys as a adversarial environment for them: another four years of the same feminized crap they saw in high school and hence they regard it as unattractive. And there really are many other options. For example one does not even need a high school diploma to sit for the "Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert" certification exam, which offers significant compensation to the holder of same, AND the opportunities to network with folks who will be useful contacts when starting your own business. And good auto mechanics and plumbers are doing very well these days, even if they don't strike out on their own. There are many choices for those who are not interested in college. Boys, apparently, are regarding those choices as better than college.
The other side of this that will drive the academics crazy is that the value of a college degree is going to diminish. For example, I have a MS in computer science and I work for a defense company. I get paid very well compared to many of my neighbors, yet I make no more than a longshoreman working in Long Beach CA.
Frank H
Of the boys I've met in my son's Boy Scout Troop many plan on going to college, though not all of them feel like they "have to." But I also have two daughters many of whose friends I've met, and I get the feeling that young women now feel somehow "obligated" by their feminists sisters to go to college no matter what they really want to do with thier lives.
I think with this current generation of kids that the feminists' grand plan for women will come to fruition - that no woman will have the choice to stay at home and raise her children, but will be forced into the workforce so the kids will be able to be controlled their entire lives by the government indoctrination system.
My nephew's kids are a perfect example. The girl was pressured by her parents to go to college, even though she was at best an indifferent student. With her BA, her first 2 years out of college the best paying job she had was clerking at a Wal-Mart, but she enjoyed her part-time work in the nursery of her church much more. She's getting marrried this summer and would like nothing more than to stay at home and make and raise babies, but her husband-to-be is saying "no way, not until you get your Master's degree and at least 2 years in a job that uses it." My bet is that she will have an "oops" just like her mother and ends up pregnant so she will never have to darken the door of an educational institution again.
best regards, nice info » »
視訊做愛視訊美女無碼A片情色影劇kyo成人動漫tt1069同志交友網ut同志交友網微風成人論壇6k聊天室日本 avdvd 介紹免費觀賞UT視訊美女交友..........................
xxx383視訊xxx383視訊xxx383視訊xxx383視訊xxx383視訊xxx383視訊xxx383視訊xxx383視訊sex520免費影片sex520免費影片sex888影片分享區sex888影片分享區sex520免費影片sex888影片分享區sex888影片分享區sex888影片分享區sex888影片分享區sex888影片分享區qq美美色網影片qq美美色網免費看qqgirl美美色網情qq美美色網aaaaa片俱樂部影片
Post a Comment
<< Home