Women dominating the ranks of college graduates – What’s the effect on America?

This will be one of the greatest social science experiments ever conducted.  After WWII nations tested free markets vs. government-dominated systems.  Europe, North America, and East Asia using variants of the former.  The red block, Africa, and Latin America using variants of the latter.  The results were clear, and the world changed.

Now we’re testing male-dominated systems vs. female-dominated systems.  The result might change the world, in ways impossible to foresee.   This post provides information about the issue. My thoughts about this appear in A better answer to “why women outperform men in college?”

Links to other posts about America’s education system appear at the end.

A summary of the situation

(A)  From “Women Now Dominate Higher Education at Every Degree Level; The Female-Male Degree Gap Grows“, Mark Perry (Professor of Economics, U of Michigan), at his blog Carpe Diem, 2 June 2009

(B)  From Brenda Turner, Oregon Employment Dept, 20 April 2009:

At age 21, women are more likely to be enrolled in college than men, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics‘ National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Each year over a 10-year period, this survey interviewed about 9,000 young men and women who were born during the years 1980 to 1984. Respondents were ages 12 to 17 when first interviewed in 1997, and ages 21 to 27 when interviewed for the tenth time in 2006-2007.

During the October when they were age 21, nearly half (46 percent) of women were attending college compared with 36% of men. This difference in college-enrollment rates stems from three factors:

1. Women were more likely to have graduated from high school;
2. among high school graduates, women were more likely to attend college; and
3. once enrolled in college, women were less likely than men to leave college between school years.

Contents

1. “At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust“, New York Times, 9 July 2006
2. “Why Do Women Outnumber Men in College?“, Digest of the National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2007
3. “Projections of Education Statistics to 2016“, Department of Education, December 2007
4. The Natural Superiority of Women, Ashley Montagu (1999)
5. “The Coming American Matriarchy“, Jonathan Rauch, National Journal, 11 January 2008
6. Brief analysis from around the Internet
7. Books and articles with more about this
8. Afterword

(1)  “At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust“, New York Times, 9 July 2006 — Excerpt:

A quarter-century after women became the majority on college campuses, men are trailing them in more than just enrollment. Department of Education statistics show that men, whatever their race or socioeconomic group, are less likely than women to get bachelor’s degrees — and among those who do, fewer complete their degrees in four or five years. Men also get worse grades than women.

And in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialized more than their female classmates.

Small wonder, then, that at elite institutions like Harvard, small liberal arts colleges like Dickinson, huge public universities like the University of Wisconsin and U.C.L.A. and smaller ones like Florida Atlantic University, women are walking off with a disproportionate share of the honors degrees.  Still, men now make up only 42% of the nation’s college students. And with sex discrimination fading and their job opportunities widening, women are coming on much stronger, often leapfrogging the men to the academic finish.

(2)  “Why Do Women Outnumber Men in College?“, Digest of the National Bureau of Economic Research, January 2007 — Excerpt:

It is fairly well known that women today outnumber men in American colleges. In 2003, there were 1.35 females for every male who graduated from a four-year college and 1.3 females for every male undergraduate. That contrasts with 1960, when there were 1.6 males for every female graduating from a U.S. four-year college and 1.55 males for every female undergraduate. How come this switch?  In T”he Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap” (NBER Working Paper No. 12139), authors Claudia Goldin, Lawrence Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko offer some explanations for the change.

… One sign of rising expectations by women is shown in the fact that women earned 45.1% of bachelor’s degrees in business in 1984-5 and 50% by 2001-2, up from only 9.1% in 1970-1. Similar large increases in the female share of BAs also have occurred in the life sciences, physical sciences, and engineering since the early 1970s. It also could be that the rise in divorce rates since the 1960s and women’s greater responsibility for children have prompted women to see an investment in college as an insurance policy for their future financial lives.

Another aspect in the reversal of the college gender gap, rather than just its elimination, is the persistence of behavioral and developmental differences between males and females. Boys often mature more slowly than girls. In grades K-12, boys tend to have a higher incidence of behavioral problems (or lower level of non-cognitive skills) than girls. Girls spend more time doing homework than boys. These behavioral factors, after adjusting for family background, test scores, and high school achievement, can explain virtually the entire female advantage in getting into college for the high school graduating class of 1992, the authors figure. It allowed “girls to leapfrog over boys in the race to college.” Similarly, teenage boys, both in the early 1980s and late 1990s, had a higher (self-reported) incidence of arrests and school suspensions than teenage girls.

The “homecoming” in the authors’ title to their paper refers to the fact that by 1980 the gender balance in college had returned to its pre-1930 level in the United States, although the levels of college attendance were almost six times higher in 1980 than in the 1920s for both men and women. The number of male-to-female undergraduates was about at parity from 1900 to 1930. Many females were attending teacher-training colleges in those days.

The highpoint of gender imbalance in college attendance was reached in 1947, after the return of men from World War II then eligible for educational subsidies through the GI bills, when undergraduate men outnumbered women 2.3 to 1. Women’s relative numbers in college have increased ever since the 1950s, with a pause when many men went to college to avoid serving in the Vietnam War.

The decline in the male-to-female ratios of undergraduates in the past 35 years is real, and not primarily due to changes in the ethnic mix of the college-aged population or to the types of post-secondary institutions they attend, the authors assert. The female share of college students has expanded in all 17 member-nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in recent decades, so much so that women now outnumber men in college in almost all rich nations.

(3) “Projections of Education Statistics to 2016“, Department of Education, December 2007 — A forecast for 2016; it’s almost certainly too conservative about this trend.

• 64% of Associates degrees will be awarded to women,
• 61% of Bachelor’s degrees,
• 63% of Master’s degrees,
• 58% of Doctoral degrees,
• 58% of Professional degrees

(4)  The Natural Superiority of Women, Ashley Montagu (1999) — Publisher’s summary:

Among the central issues of the modern feminist movement, the debate over biology and culture over sex and gender, over genetics and gender roles has certainly been one of the most passionately contested. Making revolutionary arguments upon its first publication in 1953, The Natural Superiority of Women stands as one of the original feminist arguments against biological determinism.

An iconoclast, Montagu wielded his encyclopedic knowledge of physical anthropology in critique of the conventional wisdom of women as the “weaker sex,” showing how women’s biological, genetic, and physical makeup made her not only man’s equal, but his superior. Also a humanist, Montagu points to the emotional and social qualities typically ascribed to and devalued in women as being key to just social life and relationships. Subsequent editions of this book have provided additional support for Montagu’s arguments, examining both biological and social scientific data of the late 20th century. One of the most broadly renowned and read scholars of our century, Montagu brings out this fifth edition with up-to-date statistics and references.

(5) “The Coming American Matriarchy“, Jonathan Rauch, National Journal, 11 January 2008 — Excerpt:

A generation from now, the female lawyer with her male assistant will be the cliché. Look for women to outnumber men in many elite professions, and potentially in the political system that the professions feed. (The election of a female president is a question of when, not whether.)  Women’s superior education will increase their earning power relative to men’s, and on average they will be marrying down, educationally speaking. A third of today’s college-bound 12-year-old girls can expect to “settle” for a mate without a university diploma. But women will not stop wanting to be hands-on moms.

For families, this will pose a dilemma. Women will have a comparative advantage at both parenting and breadwinning. Many women will want to take time off for child-rearing, but the cost of keeping a college-educated mom at home while a high-school-educated dad works will be high, often prohibitive.

Look, then, for rising pressure on government to provide new parental subsidies and child care programs, and on employers to provide more flextime and home-office options — among various efforts to help women do it all. Look, too, for a cascading series of psychological and emotional adjustments as American society tilts, for the first time, toward matriarchy. What happens to male self-esteem when men are No. 2 (and not necessarily trying harder)? When more men work for women than the other way around?

… {Men} will not become mothers anytime soon, and they will not stop secreting testosterone. Men’s ambition will ensure ample male representation at the very top of the social order, where CEOs, senators, Nobelists, and software wunderkinds dwell. Women will not rule men.

But they will lead. Think about this: Not only do girls study harder and get better grades than boys; girls now take more high school math and science than do high school boys. If there is a “weaker sex,” it isn’t female.

(6)  Reactions from around the Internet

(A)  The Instapundit, 25 June 2002 — I believe he understates the situation, as this is even more true of grade school. 

SEX DISCRIMINATION IN COLLEGE: 57% of degrees are going to women. There’s a lot of hand-wringing about why, but they miss the obvious: over the past 20 years there has been a concerted effort to make colleges male-unfriendly environments, with attacks on fraternities, with anti-male attitudes in many classes, with intrusive sexual-harassment rules that start with the assumption that men are evil predators, and so forth. Now men don’t find college as congenial a place. It’s a hostile environment, quite literally.

How come none of the experts quoted in this article has noticed that?

Update:  He wrote about this in more detail in ”Where the Boys Aren’t“, TCS Daily, 27 September 2005 — Excerpt:

{I}t seems to me that there are three possible ways of looking at the growing higher-education gender imbalance.

One would be to treat it the way we treat other “underrepresentation” issues in higher education: By wondering what universities are doing wrong. … The remedy, in this view: Affirmative action for male candidates, re-education for faculty, campus “men’s centers” to match the womens’ centers that were created when women were an underrepresented group on campus (and which still remain today almost everywhere), and efforts to make curricula, dormitories, and recruiting more male-friendly… There seems little doubt that if any other group were suffering similar declines in college attendance, this is precisely the approach we’d be seeing, and some schools have already been trying this to some degree.

The second approach would be to shrug the problem off. Men aren’t going to college as much? Big deal. Maybe it’s because women are smarter, or better suited to such things.

(B)  “Something else for Margaret Spellings“, blog of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, 23 September 2005

A generation of young men is losing out in a very big way. But there is no real outrage as higher education becomes a feminized system. Indeed, the outrage is still running the other way–we hear continually about the marginalization of women in the academy, and the difficulties women students face. The question of why there are so few women in the hard sciences draws impassioned debate, urgent calls for equity, and lots and lots of money. But the question of why young men are disappearing from campus is not even being widely asked. And it certainly isn’t being studied systematically. It should be, and Margaret Spellings has the power to ensure that it is.

(C)  “The Death of Macho“, Reihan Salam, Foreign Policy, 22 June 2009 – Based on a superfical, even false, analysis of the causes of the financial crisis.  But very PC, very trendy.  Hat tip to Zenpundit.  Excerpt:

Manly men have been running the world forever. But the Great Recession is changing all that, and it will alter the course of history. 

For years, the world has been witnessing a quiet but monumental shift of power from men to women. Today, the Great Recession has turned what was an evolutionary shift into a revolutionary one. The consequence will be not only a mortal blow to the macho men’s club called finance capitalism that got the world into the current economic catastrophe; it will be a collective crisis for millions and millions of working men around the globe.

(7)  For more information on this subject

• The Decline of Males: The First Look at an Unexpected New World for Men and Women, Dr. Lionel Tiger (biological anthropologist)
• The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, Christina Hoff Sommers
• The Myth of Male Power, Warren Farrell
• Heterophobia: Sexual Harassment and the Future of Feminism, Daphne Patai

(8)  Afterword

Please share your comments by posting below.  Per the FM site’s Comment Policy, please make them brief (250 words max), civil, and relevant to this post.  Or email me at fabmaximus at hotmail dot com (note the spam-protected spelling).

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For more information

To read other articles about these things, see the FM reference page on the right side menu bar. Of esp relevance to this topic:

• America – how can we reform it?

Posts about America’s education system:

1. College education in America, another broken business model, 3 July 2009
2. The secret about our universities (seldom even whispered among Professors), 5 July 2009
3. Women dominating the ranks of college graduates – What’s the effect on America?, 7 July 2009
4. Is a college education worth a million dollars?, 10 July 2009

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