Currently, 135 women receive bachelor's degrees for every 100 men. That gender imbalance will widen in the coming years, according to a new report by the U.S. Department of Education.
This is ominous for every parent with a male child. The decline in college attendance means many will needlessly miss out on success in life. The loss of educated workers also means the country will be less able to compete economically. The social implications — women having a hard time finding equally educated mates — are already beginning to play out.
But the inequity has yet to provoke the kind of response that finally opened opportunities for women a generation ago. In fact, virtually no one is exploring the obvious questions: What has gone wrong? And what happens to all the boys who aren't in college?
Some join the armed forces, but the size of the military has remained steady, at about 1.4 million, for the past decade. For the rest, the prospects appear dark:
Read the whole thing here.
I had been aware of this problem for some time but didn't realize that the ratios were as imbalanced as that. The article goes on to suggest a couple of reasons for the discrepancy:
1) The feminization of teaching at all levels has created a hostile environment for young men. This can be countered to some extent by hiring more male teachers.
2) In contemporary youth culture "smart-isn't-cool."How to counter this I haven't a clue, but having male role models in the school systems is a start.
I would note that out educational systems from top to bottom are now suffering a crisis of legitimacy that is not noted in this article. The industrial model of education that emerged during the Progressive Era just is no longer functional in our modern economy and pressure for radical change is building in a number of quarters.
In the past, the feminization of a profession or occupational category has resulted in its loss of status and economic rewards. Perhaps we are seeing that cultural process being applied to educational institutions and the teaching profession at all levels. If so we can look forward to a dramatic decline in the economic and cultural value of a college degree, a dilution of universities' credentialling function, a decline in the status and pay of the professoriat, and the elimination of academic freedom.
Now stop and think -- don't we already see those processes taking place?
I have long questioned whether a college-level education was appropriate for most young people. The system as currently constituted requires young men and women to remain in a marginal state of prolonged adolescence well into their twenties, and even into their thirties. By the time a young man or woman takes his first serious job he or she has spent seventeen or eighteen years in all-encompassing educational institutions. This, I would argue, is neither natural nor good for the individuals or for society.
Apologists for the system argue that today's economy requires high skill levels that can only be achieved through a prolonged and intensive educational process, but that is patently false. Employers constantly complain that they have to retrain worker fresh out of college. The essential skills are learned at the workplace, not in the classroom. And, stop to think just how much of the educational experience is directly applicable to the demands of employment. Not much, if you are honest about it.
If the industrial model for education was a product of the Progressive Era, the extended learning process was a post-WWII response to a critical labor surplus. The post-war labor glut produced by millions of young men returning from the service was exacerbated by the civil rights reforms that moved millions of minority workers from the margins into the mainstream of the American workforce, and then by the abolition of the draft which meant that millions of young men who otherwise would have spent time in the service were now mainstreamed directly into the labor force, and finally by feminism which moved millions of young women into the labor force.
Starting with the GI Bill and the National Defense Education Act America responded to the labor glut by vastly expanding our educational institutions at all levels and subsidizing the warehousing of young people in those environments. As the labor pressure has increased so, too has the educational establishment. Then in the 1970's, as women increasingly moved out of the home and into the workplace and as single motherhood flourished, educational institutions again expanded into total environments wherein young people spent more and more of their waking time.
Maybe it's time for a general reassessment of the entire Brobdingnagian structure. I think it's coming, whether or not educators are prepared for it.
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