Cheryl Rofer has a good post at LGM and her blog about fewer men going to college, which could be related to the number of women attending.
I’m willing to draw a conclusion from this: Men react in different ways to the influx of women into college. There are broadly three groups: Welcoming, rejecting, and neutral. Some men have changed their lives for a more egalitarian society.
Those articles, then, about the crisis in men’s education (or just in men) refer to the thoroughly rejecting group. It is their enrollments that are going down and depressing men’s numbers more generally. It is their problems that we see a focus on. I would like to know what the numbers are of these three groups, but I’m not aware of any polling in this area,
She updated her post to include this graph:
I saw this the other day on Bluesky and was thinking that there’s a lot to be said about it, and Cheryl’s piece is a good start. To me, the really interesting part is the graph to the right, indicating that the same strain of what we used to call anti-intellectualism on the right infects both men and women. (I’d like to find a better name than “anti-intellectualism” to describe that phenomenon.)
Baud
The right has been telling people that going to college makes you liberal. Which is not entirely false.
David_C
My boss gave one of those “career day” talks at a private high school and noticed that girls were attentive and engaged while the boys were off in the back, looking at their phones. I wonder if there have been changes in engagement in education or expectation in high schools across generations. It would be interesting to pose some hypotheses and collect more data.
Professor Bigfoot
“Anti-intellectualism” seems inadequate to the task, doesn’t it?
How about “a well-considered commitment to mediocrity?”
Suzanne
Mr. Suzanne and I met in graduate school. His program had three men total in the master’s and PhD programs. My program was much more evenly mixed, but almost all of my professoriate was men, as the profession was male-dominated until recently. When I go to campuses to do recruitment, I still see a roughly even gender breakdown. I cannot help but notice that our fees/wages have gone down simultaneous with women growing in the profession.
trollhattan
Can’t remember even once while in college thinking “we need fewer women here.”
raven
When I was working on my doc in Adult Ed our classes had more women than men. Sometimes students would have to bring a child to the classes that were largely at night. I remember one kid asked his mom “why are the men so quiet”!!!!
Another Scott
Thanks for FPing Cheryl’s post.
The inflection point in the graph seems (very roughly) to be around 2012 in both cases.
TICAS.org (28 page .pdf) – from December 2013:
Yes, over the long term college pays off, and yes those with only high-school educations have a much worse time of it, but taking on $30k in debt and being unemployed or under-employed at the end is a sure-fire way to drive potential students away.
There are likely other factors as well, of course, but in just about every other part of the economy we’re supposed to follow the money – why not in education?
Thanks.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: They might want to consider the value of a worldview so fragile that it can only survive inside a cognitive bubble. Who am I kidding, of course they don’t want to consider that.
zhena gogolia
@trollhattan: Hahaha!
I wish the word “disinterest” hadn’t been used incorrectly. (pet peeve)
Steve LaBonne
@trollhattan: Way back when I taught for a few years at Union College in upstate NY, there was a big discussion among the faculty about why students were less serious / put in less work than in the past. A (male) colleague in my department (Biology) suggested that if people wanted Union to be more academically rigorous, the way to do it would be to make it a women’s college.
Old Man Shadow
Colleges are bad-mouthed a lot in Republican circles as “woke” factories.
Colleges and unis also make it a lot easier to hate them as elitist when they multi-billion dollar endowments and keep increasing the tuition prices and hiring cronies in bullshit positions while hiring mostly adjuncts at cheap wages.
Student loans are a major issue. Friend’s kid decided he’d rather go into electrical work and do that instead of taking on the debt. It might help if we made state colleges and unis public again meaning free tuition to any state resident.
Not sure how we can get Republicans to believe science again when it is in the best interest of their donors and media entities to muddy up the science and confuse the people.
scav
There’s quite possibly an uptake of the MRS degree among tradwomen. Especially as not outcompeting the men is an attractive plus in certain dating pools.
Butch
Because I worked as an editor for a very long time, I feel compelled to point out that “disinterest” means “impartial,” not uninterested.
Steve LaBonne
@zhena gogolia: @Butch: Thanks, that’s a chalk on the blackboard thing for me.
satby
Evergreen quote:
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
Isaac Asimov
zhena gogolia
@Butch: Thank you!
raven
@Another Scott: My diss looked at the difference in earnings between regular HS and GED grads. Pretty stark stuff.
piratedan
perhaps we need to consider if stupidity is contagious? Perhaps it’s transmitted thru the eyes and ears….
linnen
The one blog entry I read that had the chart started in the second half to lean heavily into FIRE’s “illiberal liberal” and conservative deplatforming. His solution was for colleges to cut back on all the DEI stuff.
Suzanne
@Old Man Shadow:
It’s staggering how public universities are barely public. I’d have to go back and dig up a link, but something like fifty years ago, taxpayers paid approximately 70% of the cost of attendance at public universities. (Varies by state, but that’s probably a good average.) It’s now closer to 10-15%, depending on the state.
This is part of why I believe in student loan forgiveness for anyone who attended a public university. I think an educated workforce is a public good and the public should pay for it.
Baud
I read that disinterested and uninterested swapped meanings some time in the distant past.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: They became synonyms- amongst the semiliterate.
Steve LaBonne
@Suzanne: But the right, in addition to not wanting to pay for anything, views education as a public evil. God said it, I believe it, that settles it.
Suzanne
@Steve LaBonne: Similar to how “ambivalent” now seems to mean “apathetic”, rather than what it used to mean, which was “having mixed feelings”.
Chris
What’s batshit insane about this is that the vast majority of us go to school, and most of those schools aren’t segregated by gender: spending the first eighteen years of your life in learning environments with a rough gender parity is the norm. It should not be any kind of a shock when the same thing is true at university. Oh look, a year ago I was sitting in a twelfth-grade classroom in my dinky little public school and roughly half the people around me were girls. Now I’m sitting in a freshman year classroom at my state university, and again, roughly half the people around me are girls. How about that.
Of all the things that change when you transition from the average high school to the average college, this is not one of them: for any remotely sane human being, it’s a seamless transition. You need to have been proactively taught something about college and girl-cooties to think that something you accepted as completely normal in kindergarten, middle school, and high school, suddenly becomes shady when it’s still true in college.
This becomes even more kookoo-bananas when you remember that, for the average student, half of “making the best of your college experience” at minimum is supposed to mean “getting laid.” I remember going to college twenty years ago at a place where it was well known there were more girls than boys. Of all the complaints I heard from all the straight guys I knew in college, the fact that there were a lot of girls was not one of them. “The odds are good,” the saying went (even if the other half of that saying was “but the goods are odd.”)
New Deal democrat
@Another Scott: A few points about this interesting subject:
1. As someone else pointed out, the divergence is for both boys and girls, which suggests Cheryl Rofer’s theory isn’t quite on point.
2. The question is worded as if asked to high schoolers, so the 2012 inflection point would be for those hoping to graduate in 2016, and the increasing job prospects later in the decade didn’t seem to improve the situation.
3. What is the arrow of causation? Do those who don’t want to go to college gravitate to the GOP, or do conservative teens decide they’re not interested in college? Or is there something else in play? Since most high schoolers haven’t settled on a political orientation yet, my best guess would be the first of the above choices as being the more likely arrow.
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
I bet it was lawyers who messed it up.
Kay
@Chris:
Great point. Most of them are coming out of high schools with 50% girls.
Chris
@Old Man Shadow:
While all of this is true, people in Republican circles don’t hate colleges because they gouge the students or are hard to access. On the contrary, they resent the students and think they have it too good, and think not going to college is a blessing because you learn from “the real world” instead.
Suzanne
@Steve LaBonne:
The downstream effect of this is something they’re going to hate, which is that work of skilled professions will probably spike in price. We already see dramatically higher salaries for doctors in the U.S. relative to Europe.
I will note that predicting a bad outcome (note my tone of resignation) is not the same as wishing for a bad outcome.
scav
That “dis-” prefix does at least lend itself to the confusion meaning both “lack of” and “opposite of” link
Baud
Just a reminder that the people leading the Republican Party and the conservative movement are mostly graduates of the Ivies.
kalakal
@Chris:
When I was doing Chem Eng back in the late 70s/early 80s the m/f ratio must have been about 9:1. But at least there was the rest of the university*… at Loughborough ( the UKs leading sports university) the ratio for the whole place was around the same. The joke throughout the entire university system was the proudest boast a male undergraduate could make was “I’m at Loughborough and I’ve got a girlfriend”
I never met a male undergraduate who complained there were too many women
*I actually met my gf at Physical Chemistry lectures – the Chemistry department had a much more even ratio
Suzanne
@Chris:
It’s the inverse: colleges gouge students and it’s hard to access financially because Republicans hate it.
Steve LaBonne
@Baud: Senator
Foghorn LeghornJohn Kennedy being a prime example.lowtechcyclist
@Steve LaBonne:
I’m all for language evolving, except when words with no good synonyms try to evolve into something different. ‘Disinterested’ is on that short list, IMHO: a disinterested observer isn’t just someone who’s impartial, it’s someone that doesn’t have a dog in that particular fight.
The one that really irks me is the watering down of ‘literally’ to mean the same as ‘figuratively.’ “He literally fell apart when he heard the news.” That sort of thing. There really is no other word to take its place if its erosion becomes complete.
Geo Wilcox
I read this years ago in a book that was printed in the 60’s. I cannot remember who wrote it or the title but the author said that when women enter a field, men leave or do not enter. He used several occupations as examples. I think one currently is veterinary medicine. There are more women than men entering that field and studying it in college.
Steve LaBonne
@lowtechcyclist: Exactly. Every erosion that makes it more difficult to express distinctions of meaning is a loss.
Steve LaBonne
@Geo Wilcox: This has been happening in forensic science for a while.
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
You are literally Steve in the WTF.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Well played, sir.
scav
@Steve LaBonne: There is the possibility of evolving a term to capture the meaning that doesn’t structurally lend itself to misinterpretation. But still, it’s English where we can dust a dusting of snow and juggle flammable and inflammable, so things could go anywhere.
A Ghost to Most
I thought there might be an article about Telnaes leaving WaPo over censorship. I’m glad I cancelled a few years ago.
Halteclere
Two thoughts: 1) in the past 10 years techbros started preaching that colleges are a waste of time. And 2) there is a lot more opportunity now to make good money in the trades
But this does not cover the whole picture, especially the difference between political orientation
Baud
Interestingly, I’ve been seeing stories of a lot of places, including deep red states, making it so that low and moderate income folks (like 100K) can attend state schools for free.
eemom
wrt the “evolution” of language vs. the legitimization of misuses, I believe it was “aggravated” that started it all.
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
I can personally attest to this. Education greatly broadened my horizons and open doors for me that would have never been opened. Admittedly I was always a little different than most of the folks in the culture I grew up in but my Progressive politics are largely because I became educated.
TONYG
@trollhattan: Yeah, really. Back in my college days (the mid-seventies) there were plenty of young men who were shy about asking young women for dates (I was one of those shy guys) — but do we have a generation of young men now who are actually afraid of young women? If so, why?
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
Learning does that when so much of conservatism is dependent on omissions, half-truths and outright lies.
RevRick
@Chris: Until very recently, most college graduates were Republicans. And my hunch is that Republican businessmen have a preference for hiring people with college credentials, because that, at least, shows some measure of discipline and the capacity to learn new things. Peasant societies are inherently conservative in temperament and behavior and highly resistant to innovation.
The rejection of college, first by GOP men, and now by GOP women shows a marked ideological stance. It’s almost like a badge of honor, proof of manly manliness, and for women who lust after that. The attitude is taking hold that college is not a place of privilege, pride, honor, status, stability and reward, but for GOP it’s for sissies (with all the homophobia wrapped up in that garbage).
The other thing to note is that the GOP base has becoming increasingly the home of working class people.
Omnes Omnibus
Downward mobility? WWC chic?
gene108
@RevRick:
Non-white working class people mostly vote for Democrats.
Omnes Omnibus
@TONYG: Vagina dentata due to vaccinations.
lowtechcyclist
@TONYG:
I think a couple more generations of women making their own way in the world has made a substantial shift in how young women see themselves, both in general and in relation to men.
Certainly among educated women, there’s less of a sense (if any trace of that attitude still survives) that if they can’t land a high-status man, then they’ll have to settle for whatever man is the best that they can land. Women nowadays are much more capable of telling men they don’t find appealing to go fuck off: they’ll do without rather than settle. And that’s a good thing, from my POV.
But from the guy POV, that means a woman’s not going to drop into your lap simply because she can’t find anybody better. And that’s a real shift of the power dynamic between when we were in college 50 years ago and now.
RaflW
I’d be curious what the gender split is at Hillsdale, Liberty, and post-Rufo, at New College FL. If conservative men can have their safe spaces, do they enroll in higher numbers? What about conservative women, do they say “Oh, no I shouldn’t even go to those schools, that’s a man’s word?”
scav
@RevRick: One is rather increasingly likely to meet the wrong sort of people at college now than in their cherished past. The wrong sort of all-the-kinds-of people. It’d be interesting to see if there are any swings in attendance at shall we call them bubble colleges (Liberty et al) during this time-frame.
Nukular Biskits
@lowtechcyclist:
Bingo!
NobodySpecial
One part people keep forgetting about is how many stories we have of “Spent myself into huge debt for the degree and now I work at Starbucks.” If it’s not rewarding, a lot of people won’t be interested. Fortunately, we have a ton of jobs we need filled that can pay well without needing a four year degree.
Prescott Cactus
I don’t think a young guy thinks to himself “gonna be a lot of girls at the colleges, I think I’ll look into the building trades”. By senior year the cootie factor has got to be gone..
NobodySpecial
@lowtechcyclist: Don’t forget that a lot of men and women still demand men hold to the old standards in this new environment while adding new requirements. Not much different to the debates among ladies over being a housewife vs. “having it all” that poisoned that discourse for a few decades.
Starfish (she/her)
@Halteclere:
@New Deal democrat: Since 2010, Peter Thiel, an extremely rich man that I am told we should not eat, has been offering a tiny number of people $100,000 to skip college.
https://www.hindustantimes.com/business/peter-thiel-has-been-giving-100k-to-students-willing-to-skip-college-why-101708853768110.html
Gloria DryGarden
@Baud: wrt most republicans and conservatives went to the ivies, combining w your prev comment, that college might create more liberals.
it makes sense that college broadens one’s exposure to a range of points of view, and encourages critical thinking, deeper awareness into cause and effect and different social movements, depending on one’s course of study.. and with better awareness and critical thinking more students might see through the conservative version of reality and end up more liberal, because of seeing reality more clearly, and understanding more of its layers.
What confuses me a little is how the students at ivies could miss that. It seems these students also, might become more liberal, or more aware and inclusive of others not in their privileged club.
I understand lots of the students there at Ivies are either coming from money, or are there to join the “big money big politics and power connections club.” But they still have to take classes, write papers and think. Is the curriculum hamstrung, or biased, because of who funds the school?
It almost makes me want to look at their curriculum, and the course descriptions in their degree programs.
Chris
@Halteclere:
There’s always some new panacea that we’re all told to chase. First it was “you should all go to college because that’s the only way to get real jobs with real money.” Then it was “you should all learn to code because it’s the Information Age and everyone will always need an IT guy.” Now it’s “you should go into the trades.” Somewhere in there was also “you should start your own business.”
Somehow it never occurs to most people that 1) whatever the current panacea is will quickly see its worth drop as it becomes saturated with all the people following that advice and pursuing it, and 2) since we will never and can never have a society that’s made up entirely of People Who Went To College, or People Who Know How To Code, or People Who Went Into The Trades, or People Who Own Their Own Business, maybe we should just fucking concentrate on making sure that every job provides at least a basic level of security.
Steve in the ATL
@Baud: my work here is done
Steve in the ATL
@TONYG:
Because chicks are scary?
Kay
@NobodySpecial:
I just…huge debt? The huge student loan debts (undergrad) are outliers. The average is 29,300. They’ll gross at least 30 a year at Starbucks, so their total debt is equal to one year of income, which is really manageable. I just don’t think it explains it.
Starfish (she/her)
@Gloria DryGarden: The people who went to those schools are told that they are going to be the leaders of tomorrow and that they have the responsibility to be the leaders of tomorrow.
They try not to think too hard about the fact that certain places in Big Law ONLY hire out of the top ten schools and that Google was very much the same way.
Suzanne
@Prescott Cactus:
I think the thinking is more that “that’s a lot of work” or “that’s not a high-status path”.
Valued commenter Martin, who spent his career working in higher ed, has shared some really interesting insights on this.
Steve in the ATL
@Omnes Omnibus: well played
Chris
@gene108:
It’s also a common category error to equate “non-college degreed” with “working-class,” one that Republicans love.
An increasing number of people with college degrees are working-class people, credentials be damned. Two hundred years ago, the simple fact of knowing to read and write put you way ahead of most of your peers and very likely to have a decent and lucrative job. Those days are long gone, for obvious reasons. Likewise, the days when college degrees were a near-certain guarantee of a better life are fading quickly.
Suzanne
@Starfish (she/her): Peter Thiel is one of the most frightening individuals alive today. Along with Curtis Yarvin.
Our soon-to-be VPOTUS has these lunatics whispering in his ear, and honest to FSM, that frightens me more than Trump.
Gloria DryGarden
@lowtechcyclist:
”Learning does that when so much of conservatism is dependent on omissions, half-truths and outright lies.”
This
Starfish (she/her)
@Suzanne: I think Curtis Yarvin is much lesser known. I used to read his blog when he kept it up back in the day. I also went to some conference that was trying to troll their entire subspecialty of computer nonsense where he was a speaker, but I missed Yarvin’s talk.
RaflW
@Old Man Shadow: “Colleges and unis also make it a lot easier to hate them as elitist when they multi-billion dollar endowments and keep increasing the tuition prices and hiring cronies in bullshit positions while hiring mostly adjuncts at cheap wages.”
It does feel like the corporate business model/enshittification/endowment fund with a school as the byproduct is a problem at mid-tier to elite private (and elite public) schools.
But I think community colleges might be even more tilted towards enrollment by women. I’ll say that to me, that’s not a problem, of course, but these are not places of excess overhead nor swelling reserves. Adjuncts, yes, absolutely.
I’ve talked some with my brother, who for many years was head of office for a business insurance giant. He found later in his career that they needed to start intern-mentoring students at places like the University of Houston (a 4 yr school) so that the students could earn some money while in school, and students benefitted a lot the mentoring relationships if they came from a family where they were first (or one of the first) to attend college. It’s worked really well for them (and has tended to me more than 50% male).
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Eat the rich crowd and NYT likes to pretend that it’s the poorly educated working class.
Chris
@Gloria DryGarden:
Other than the military, college is the institution in our society that throws you into an environment with a ton of people whose backgrounds, cultures, ways of doing things, just generally the particular bubbles they grew up in for the first eighteen years of your life, are completely different from yours, forcing you to get along with them at least to the bare minimum extent, and just generally rubbing your face in the fact that Not Everybody’s Like You.
Frankly, that alone makes it worthwhile.
Baud
OT nothing happens until it happens, and media is unreliable, but apparently the Hill is reporting that RFK may get support from … Fetterman and Sanders.
scav
@NobodySpecial: So, conservative males are increasingly debt averse as are to a lesser degree conservative women while liberals comparatively just don’t give a shit? Yes, it exists, but I’m not seeing how it explains the observed divergent behaviors.
Prescott Cactus
@Suzanne: I’m not familiar with valued commenter Martin, (bummer).
Many trades are looking for kids to join an apprenticeship, especially females. Waking up at 5am to work outside for 8 hours in a steel mill or refinery during a Chicago winter is a hard sell.
For the record: 22 years in the bonds of holy matrimony. The luckiest man, in the world.
Gloria DryGarden
@Starfish (she/her): well couldn’t they be liberals AND leaders?
Another Scott
@Baud: +1
Don’t watch what they say so much as watch what they do.
Best wishes,
Scott.
hrprogressive
@Chris:
I think this is exactly it.
My parents, well-meaning as they were, were very insistent 20 years ago to “just go to college, get a degree, any degree, so that you can get a good job”.
Got a Bachelor’s in ’09 which, you know, was just after the Financial Shitshow of 2008, so it did sort of help me in some cases, but it was not the Golden Ticket to The American Dream I was told it would be.
I think my parents genuinely meant well, and understood things to be as they were in a good-faith effort to set me up for success.
But a BS and an MBA later, and $55k in student loan debt, and only kind of “getting by” mostly because I chose not to have children and also got lucky in buying my house well before the pandemic…
I, and a lot of other people probably hear this advice and think “What’s the Point”?
Now, of course, today’s men have a lot of issues with red-pilled manosphere bullshit basically telling them it’s all the fault of women or gays or beta cucks or wokeism or whatever dumb fucking bullshit they are saying these days to boil the blood of the bros, but in reality, it’s our vulture capitalist, shareholders-only economy that punishes everyone who isn’t already wealthy so our Gilded Betters can enjoy Gilded Age 2, Inequality Harder.
Funny how a lot of those so-called influencers are often wealthy and of means themselves, so of course, they stoke the culture war to prevent a class war from breaking out and taking them down, too.
Nukular Biskits
Why is it some of the really great topics come up when I can only post mobile????
ETA: Edited. The original post made it look like I didn’t value all the topics here.
RaflW
@Kay: Maybe at some point in the past. But housing is way over 40% of income for people in 30K service jobs now. If one is spending over that percent just to reside safely, more debt is very very difficult to manage.
Both college and housing have increased in cost faster than overall inflation or wage growth, and the combo platter is quite destabilizing for younger people (or even midlife college-enterers).
Professor Bigfoot
I read somewhere that Black women were now the most educated demographic… and now “college isn’t necessary.”
The de-financing of higher (and lower) education can be traced to Brown v Board.
Conservatives have fought against broad education ever since then.
Suzanne
@Starfish (she/her): The podcast “Beyond the Bastards” did two episodes on Curtis Yarvin, with Ed Helms as a guest. If you are like me, and you enjoy podcasts while driving or exercising, they’re worth a listen. Be prepared to want to puke.
JD Vance terrifies me. Like, I find myself in the deeply head-fucked space of hoping that TFG doesn’t die in the next four years, because Vance and his backers are the most dangerous people in the country.
Chris
@hrprogressive:
Graduated the same year as you, and yeah, this exactly.
I don’t blame the parents: they were sold a line of bullshit just like we were, and that plus the fact that, in their day, it really was true convinced them.
Suzanne
@Baud: Fetterman makes me want to bang my head into a wall. Haven’t felt as terrible about a vote since Sinema.
UGHHHHH the things we do to win elections sometimes make me feel really fucken dirty.
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
This. Of course, that $29,300 was in 2012, so it’s a bit higher now, but whatever it is now might be a year and a half at Starbucks instead of a year. IOW, they can still make the payments even if they don’t get a college-grad type job right off the bat.
Professor Bigfoot
@Suzanne: I think that’s it— as more women do it, more men see it as being inherently devalued.
lowtechcyclist
@Steve in the ATL:
I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.
Suzanne
@Professor Bigfoot: I read that Black women are the fastest-growing cohort on college campuses. And generations of LGBTQ+ kids have used college as a way to get away from their bigoted families forever. So, of course…. white men want to devalue degrees as soon as women and Black people and LGBTQ+ start kicking their asses at it.
“I’m taking my ball…..and going HOME!”
Gin & Tonic
@Suzanne: He will be caucusing with the Republicans before the end of this Congress, is my prediction.
Kay
@RaflW:
They are paying more for housing, that’s true.
I think college should be affordable – it was for me. I just don’t like the outliers of student debtors being portrayed as the norm. I’d take care of the outliers with a tweak or two to the bankruptcy code, clean that up, and then get a clearer picture of what most people need.
I thought “student loan forgiveness” as it was done made no sense at all. It was unpopular too.
We’ve done a lot towards affordability. Any public school student in Ohio with decent grades can get an associates in high school, free and many, many do.
It’s nearly K-14 already. There is just no excuse for not getting a two year degree or training of some kind.
RaflW
@Kay: Student loan forgiveness was kludged after the Supreme Court messed it up (and that was because Congress couldn’t be arsed to do anything, so Biden and his team stretched to reach policy goals Republicans oppose)
That said, I think there are a ton of jobs that should be coded for Associates Degree folks. Didn’t say it upthread, but my brother who managed ~200 people said he thought quite a few of the positions that (distant) corporate viewed as 4 year degree positions were absolutely positions where 2-year post HS folks would perform well and be happy (as happy as one can be in megacorp cubeland).
Suzanne
@Gin & Tonic: Fetterman, who comes from a wealthy family, went to Harvard, and whose parents financially supported him into his forties…. cosplays as a member of the working class, and then pulls this kind of shit. Said he’s gonna vote for TV host Dr. Oz to run CMS. It’s humiliating.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Some factoids:
Per Kay’s comment, current average student debt is about $38K for a 4-year degree. It’s not a moronic number compared to a lot of moronic numbers in 2025 but in comparison, it’s high. I got out of grad school in 1985 with a $6500 student loan debt, $5K of that from grad school. Today that would be $19K so half of what the average 4-year degree should be. That’s too high and again, another result of 40+ years of Reaganomics baked into the US system and accepted by a large political spectrum.
A nice graph on undergraduate enrollment, by gender from 1970:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/236360/undergraduate-enrollment-in-us-by-gender/
Note the gap between men and women, it’s not a new thing. That gets conflated with specific areas that have seen significant increases in women enrollment. Law schools are a great example:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/236360/undergraduate-enrollment-in-us-by-gender/
Scroll down to % of Women in Law Schools and see where the leap occurred. IIRC, law schools at that time made a broad, dedicated effort to recruit women. I don’t know how salaries compare over that time frame.
A trend anybody with a pet has seen over the last 30 years is what’s happened in veterinary science. Dr Kate Boatright has a good piece on what’s happened and what might happen:
https://todaysveterinarypractice.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2022/10/TVP-2022-1112_Student_Trends.pdf
A telling quote in her piece:
Finally, billionaire, libertarians like Theil are a threat. The irony is we have a swatch of “new liberal” Dems, including many here, who actively promote economic policies he’s helped fund via a variety of groups and bought think tanks/academic departments nationwide. There’s a reason I call them “Libertarians in Trench Coats”. Cognitive dissonance isn’t solely a right wing thing.
Professor Bigfoot
@Suzanne: He’s still better than Shady Vance, which is what WE got— or that used-car salesman who’s about to become the newest Senator from Ohio.
Damned low bar, but well, here we are.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: So are most top Dems.
Suzanne
@Professor Bigfoot: Yes, Fetterman is better than Vance. In the sense that haggis is better than a dog shit sandwich.
It is to sigh.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
We don’t pretend to hate college.
Also, too, Biden and Harris were not Ivies.
eemom
@Baud:
I saw that earlier today, and…..
Well, as you say, nothing happens until it happens, is how I calmed myself down.
But that really, really needs to be the focus of unequivocal outrage from the good folks of PA and VT.
Steve LaBonne
@Suzanne: I remember reading all about what an awful centrist Conor Lamb was, LOL. It’s not only Republicans who engage in stupid meme-based voting (and I admit being taken in by Fetterman myself).
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: And they were rather remarkable for that.
Chris
@Suzanne:
The same guy he beat two years ago. Christ.
VFX Lurker
A hearty “YAY!” to both trends. Wishing both demographics continued success and prosperity.
“Boo!” to the demographics who reject the success of their neighbors.
Kay
@RaflW:
Oh, I know Congress did nothing so Biden did what he could. But debt forgiveness that isn’t even equitable among sets of debtors is just really bad policy. I think the most important word in all of politics is “fair”. People have to perceive things as fair. What was the plan? Forgive all the debt…for how long into the future? So no one ever has to get paid? We’ll just issue fake loans in perpetuity? It’s insane.
Suzanne
@Steve LaBonne: There was also another great candidate in that race…. Malcolm Kenyatta, who would have been the first Black senator from PA. He’s fairly progressive, and serves in the State House in one of Philly’s districts. I was feeling all torn about my vote — heart said Kenyatta, head said Fetterman — and ultimately went with Fetterman, because he quickly came out after Dobbs with a full-throated statement in support of abortion rights.
Kenyatta ran for Auditor General this cycle and lost. That sucked. I hope for a good career for him.
Baud
@Chris:
That’s not unusual. The problem is Oz is unqualified.
Although As far as I know, Oz isn’t nuts.
Princess
@RaflW: Great question, the statistics I found say Liberty is 55-45 women to men; Hillsdake is closer— 50.4-49.6 women to men. But men outnumbered at both places.
NotMax
@Suzanne
Hey, now. Haggis is pretty darn tasty.
karen marie
@lowtechcyclist: All these men have mothers. Why are women still turning out retrograde sons?
Suzanne
@Chris: Not just the guy he beat two years ago….. a fucking talk-show host to administrate two of our most critical links in the social safety net.
Gloria DryGarden
@Omnes Omnibus: that most of top dems also went to the ivies:
what would you like us to infer from that?
What do you think needs to happen for more leadership to develop from non Ivy League colleges?
Now of course one wonders which folks here on this blog, went to an ivy, and what insider insights we can glean.
Kay
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Is 48 including grad school? Because public undergrad average is 30, and about 37 for privates.
azelie
@Baud:
In my red state we have a college subsidy program that is not income sensitive. Depending on test scores and GPAs, students get significant subsidy for college. I think it started with the idea that it would help those from low income backgrounds, but it is now a program that also allows high income students to offset or eliminate tuition. So instead of making college more affordable across the board, we’ve decided to make the cost dependent on a formula that lowers cost for some students.
On the one hand, this is meant to keep promising students in state for college and hopefully beyond, and I definitely have students who would not be able to go to college without the support. On the other hand, we’ve had a proliferation of fancy apartments off campus – families who can pay tuition are in many cases putting the money into their kid’s lodging etc.
lowtechcyclist
@karen marie:
Why is it the mom who’s responsible? Most kids have two parents.
Also, after a certain point, one’s peers start being the major influence on one’s values.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gloria DryGarden: I dispute the premise that the Ivies and similar schools are vastly more conservative than other colleges and universities.
As far as the rest goes, you will need to come up with your own ideas. It’s something I am interested in spending a lot of time contemplating.
Gloria DryGarden
@VFX Lurker:
yup. Boggles the mind.
Crab bucket?
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Gloria DryGarden:
Most likely, simply how entrenched Ivy grads are in the upper echelons of gubmint no matter the party.
Obama’s, we all know where he went to school, economics team were a case in point:
Tim Geithner: Dartmouth
Larry “Fucking” Summers: MIT then Harvard
Peter Orzag: Princeton
Chistina Romer: MIT then Berkeley
Austin Goolsbee: MIT then U of Chicago!
I would have said Romer was the outlier but then it’s pretty clear MIT grads, at least in that narrow snapshot, are right up there with the Ivies. And of course you can’t have an economics team w/o a U of Chicago representative. AUSTERITY BITCHES!!!!!!
One of my favorite saved slurs combines the Federalist Society and Ivy league law schools:
Baud
Chris Murphy is good on RFK
Booger
@lowtechcyclist: Compose/comprise. It’s THE hill I will die on.
Sorry, the hill on which I will die.
Suzanne
@Kay: Marco Rubio, of all people, had not-the-worst-idea-ever. He introduced a bill that would eliminate the interest from federal student loans and replace it with a relatively small financing fee, paid back over the course of the loan.
catclub
physical chemistry indeed.
Kay
Well, my youngest loved college and he’s very sad he’s graduating this year and has to get a job. My daughter told him not to leave “it’s horrible out here” :)
catclub
@Booger: or, ‘The hill I will die on, you assholes’
Gloria DryGarden
@Omnes Omnibus: ok. But better connected to more power brokers, perhaps?
The inside of the power world may have some dark, controlling influence to keep new members toeing the line. There may be a lot more of that going on than meets the eye.
Baud
@Gloria DryGarden:
Sex parties.
schrodingers_cat
@kalakal: Husband kitteh, found some research papers for me that I needed for my thesis that my University didn’t subscribe to. This was in the 90s when journals online were not as ubiquitous as they are today.
OT: I am visiting London for a week. And have been collecting suggestions and advice. Do you think a day trip to the Stonehenge is possible.
You can also answer me on my bloggy email. Or DM me on Twitter or Bluesky.
azelie
@Suzanne:
State disinvestment in higher ed has had horrible effects. It goes along with diminishing belief in education as a public good.
And beyond shifting costs to students and their families, the way our society has done it has also made it a boon to lending agencies. If we’re going to make students and their families borrow money for tuition, the federal government (and maybe state governments) could have created payment programs that just cover the costs of tuition, rather than creating a situation in which students take out loans and wind up paying so much more than the actual cost of tuition.
Gloria DryGarden
@Suzanne: good idea. Less money making, but less fraud, more public good. Less oppressive financial burden.
why is public good not a real value among conservatives? (Afaict)
Kay
@Suzanne:
I don’t like them carrying debt from phase to phase of their life, so I would get rid of all these crazy-long payment periods, but no INTEREST loans I love.
The Biden income-based repayment is basically a Chapter 13 payment plan in bankruptcy. But it’s WAY too long.
I want them to move on with their lives, unencumbered. Then they can encumber up again and buy houses and cars :)
We’re keeping people in this horrible system way too long.
Gloria DryGarden
@Baud: that’s actually true.
But that’s not all. I am sure of this.
as addicted $ to sex as some of these guys are, do you think that’s enough?
RevRick
@gene108:
@Chris: Points taken. Thank you for correcting my sloppy comment.
Suzanne
@azelie:
The bill that Rubio introduced would have done exactly that. But even if one of them — in the same phenomenon as a stopped clock being right twice a day —has a good idea…… the rest of them make sure it goes nowhere.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: That’s the Piers Gaveston Society at Oxford.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat: I hope you saw there was lots of good advice on that other thread where you asked about the Eye.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Kay:
I believe you meant $38K. I listed one source out of maybe 6 I looked up. All were in the same ballpark for 4-year, public university student debt load, some $36-37K, others a little higher.
The overall debate about the cost of college eliminating that route for people is somewhat debatable when you look at the historic data:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184260/educational-attainment-in-the-us/
Funny how the people agitating about this financial hurdle the loudest happen to be white, middle-class people and not, let’s say a single mother with a HS education and one kid she wants to get into college.
I’ve said many times before that the cutbacks in governmental-level support of higher education for people at income levels and from backgrounds that really need the support, the cutbacks that I observed first hand in their beginnings, when in college, are appalling. And the entire “student loan” scam as it was eventually constructed need massive overhauls and reinvestments at the federal and state levels.
But as you’ve alluded to, the raw numbers don’t necessarily support some of the arguments being made.
Gloria DryGarden
@Suzanne: made sure.
leaving the present tense for the optimistic options more of us prefer to make happen. It’s a policy.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gloria DryGarden: Connections and trading on them exist at all levels of all societies.
schrodingers_cat
@zhena gogolia: Yes I did and bookmarked it.
Suzanne
@Kay: I enrolled in the Biden SAVE plan as soon as it was available. I feel like it’s very fair, with the exception of the interest. Under the plan, interest doesn’t grow, but it doesn’t go down, either. So I pay on it every month and make no headway on the principal.
Which creates a perverse incentive: it’s worth it for me to make the minimum payments and stick any extra money in an index fund or a high-yield savings account instead. If they had the financing-fee approach, I could throw any extra money at the balance and the government would get their money back faster.
Gvg
Has anyone considered how much k-12 has changed in the last 50 years? School is far harder, they have homework in kindergarten and test anxiety is sky high. My nephew has never enjoyed school and I did. The other nephew who may be genius level, hates to read books and won’t if not assigned anymore even though he is a straight A gifted student on a robotics team that competes nationally. He had hysterics and hid in his closet over a b grade on one paper. He is not unusual. College test anxiety is a problem and sometimes leads to hospitalization or breakdowns. I have to read about the results for my job. But the work load and pressure on little kids is dramatically harder than when I was young. Maybe the question should be why are women better able to stay interested in education? This is Florida, but I think the trend is national.
RevRick
@catclub: Svante Arrhenius wants to be your daddy.
Prescott Cactus
@schrodingers_cat: per Rome2Rio: 1:45 min train and 15 minute taxi. I remember there were also tours that start / end in London. Enjoy !
JaySinWA
I’m not an Ivy insider, but I think the problem boils down to the old boys network. The people in power are continuing the Ivy’s dominance much like nepotism keeps meritocracy from prevailing. Not to mention that legacy enrollment marries the old boys network to nepotism.
Kay
@Suzanne:
Ha! Good for you. That happened with mortgage rates for a long time – it didn’t make sense to pay it down.
The Obama Administration actually did the first reduction in loan repayment length, then Biden cut it again. It’s still too long. We have a whole expert debt court and code in the US – bankruptcy courts and code. I don’t know why we have to reinvent the wheel for student debt. There is a whole huge Facebook group just for public service loans. They navigate each other thru that insane system. It’s too complicated. Simplify.
RevRick
@Gvg: My wife taught kindergarten at a private school. When she began they were using a program, Writing to Read I was stunned at how academically demanding their kindergarten was. In mine, back in the 50s, I learned letters, numbers, colors, and paste tasted great.
Marmot
I’m late to this, but nobody has mentioned the later development of executive function in many, many young men. (I was one, this one time.)
Yes, it’s very real. No, I don’t know why Repubs would skew more anti-college, though I suspect resentful idiots gravitate toward the right. Some people just can’t get enough of “they think they’re better than us!”
Anyway, as I see it, minus the barriers of bigotry, women turned out to have been much more well-suited to college in early adulthood.
Suzanne
@Gvg:
This is an interesting question.
One theory that I have read cites the fact that women and girls generally score higher on measures of conscientiousness, including aspects such as order, dutifulness, and self-discipline. The idea is related to your observation….. that schooling has gotten somewhat more difficult and thus those skills are more necessary to succeed.
I will note that my kindergartener only gets recess once a day, and she gets homework, and it makes me crazy.
azelie
@Suzanne: The banks/loan agencies would scream bloody murder if legislation like this looked like it was making any headway.
kalakal
@schrodingers_cat: Certainly is doable.
It’s about 80 miles from London, an hour and a half to 2 hours each way. There’s a lot of trains but you’d need a taxi/bus at the other end. It’s years since I’ve been so I’m not sure what the entry procedure is when you get there these days. I’d check with English Heritage’s website were I you.
It’s well worth seeing. I hope you have a great time in London, there are so many wonderful things there. There was some great advice on that thread a couple of days ago.
Kay
@Suzanne:
My heart goes out to the people on this nutty merry go round where they don’t know how much they owe or what will happen next. People who made policy in the US used to understand the value of certainty for ordinary people. How can they possibly budget or plan if the rules change every 12 months? This chaos is just so stressful for debtors. Give them a fair plan with low or no interest and stick with it.
Gloria DryGarden
i expect you’re right. However,
This is the first time I’ve felt condescended to, and mansplained to, on this blog. And minimized, too.
Kay
Elon Musk is accusing everyone of pedophilia. I think we know what that means. Scandal coming.
Suzanne
@Kay: There’s so many aspects of our governance that create uncertainty. It makes me crazy. It’s bad at all levels — from individual citizens like me and the millions of other people who want to just be able to calculate our budgets….. all the way to up to the biggest corporations.
I remember working with my healthcare clients in the lead-up to the ACA. They were terrified of making capital investments. Uncertainty was freezing them in place. Once it passed, and about a year went by….. they started doing new projects in earnest. Building new capacity. All of which will be there when a large generation reaches their peak healthcare-consuming years.
schrodingers_cat
@kalakal: Anything else you would like to add? Also are there any museums/resources about the British presence in India in London open to the public?
Marmot
@Suzanne: I think this is related to what I mentioned—later development of executive function in young men. (I’ve always been uncomfortable with psychology’s hazy personality trait definitions.)
I’ve heard, but not read, that it helps explain why young women get better grades while essentially scoring the same on standardized tests.
(That’s one reason I defend those imperfect things. When everyone’s telling you you’re a dummy, the score says otherwise.)
Kay
@Suzanne:
Middke class people don’t have money, so they need consistency of finances over TIME. Time is what they have. A well off person can weather uncertainty – but ordinary people cannot.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gloria DryGarden: I am sorry the you feel that way.
NobodySpecial
@Kay: It’s not the sole factor, probably, but it IS a factor. Ask the simple question: Would you rather work a $30k job while being $30k in debt or not? Do you want to work even a $60k job while being $30k in debt, given that the mere fact of existing costs more of your check than it did 30 years ago, and therefore financing debt is harder?
Harrison Wesley
I admit I have no clue what’s going on with college today. I started at Fancy Liberal Arts School ln the late 60s, got kicked out twice in three years (from the same place), worked mindless jobs until 1995, when I found myself unemployed, no skills, age 44. Got quicky diploma from Close Cover Before Striking University, which was enough to get me some nonprofit gigs writing grants and a chance to sneak through to retirement. Only advice I can give the Youngs is “don’t be me.”
Suzanne
@Kay: As for public service loans….. Mr. Suzanne was on the Facebook group! LOL! His loans finally got forgiven. Putting together his application was just a staggering amount of work. He had to get documentation not just from the districts he taught at, but each individual school (the public school teacher loan forgiveness only applied to those teachers who taught in Title One schools for ten years or more). He actually completed that obligation during the First TFG Reign of Terror, and then, of course, TFG had his goons do everything they could to deny the promised loan forgiveness. So we paid for two additional years. I will note that we did not get a refund.
It also makes me crazy that we refer to it as “Public Service Loan Forgiveness”….. like the government is forgiving them for a sin they committed. Schoolteachers and others who serve the public deserve the thanks of a grateful nation.
Suzanne
@Marmot: I have read similar things. Basically, for whatever reason, girls’ brains seem to be ready at earlier ages for the mental organization part of school.
One of the biggest deficits that I have seen with my kids, coming out of the pandemic and schooling via Zoom, is that they lost the sense of writing things down on actual paper. Manual note-taking, keeping an agenda or a calendar, showing their work on math problems. They’re so sick of hearing me harangue them about it! LOL!!!
Kay
@NobodySpecial:
I just think this horror at 30k debt is not reality. They borrow 50k for a car. The idea behind student loans is education appreciates, and you can borrow for an appreciating asset. Its the same idea as buying property, more abstract, but its not DEpreciating, right? The degree will bring higher wages over 30 years and that’s just the bare dollar value. College is like training wheels for adulthood – a controlled environment where you can do dumb shit and get away with it and its also where college graduates meet OTHER college graduates, which is frankly why lots of middle class people insist on it. They’re buying a peer group.
In ten years your 50k car is worthless. That’s not true of your education.
The conservative argument against college is dumb and narrow. They haven’t thought about this at all. They’re mad because their kids come home and no.longer think their parents are all-knowing. That’s because they think children are property and not people.
Starfish (she/her)
@Gvg:
Some parents saw this and rallied against it so not all schools are doing this. Some folks have attacked homework as an equity issue because the folks making HOMEWORK for kindergarten are generally making tasks for parents and not things that kindergarteners can self manage. And there are some parents who don’t have time to do busy work that school teachers are creating for them.
George W. Bush’s No Child Gets Ahead has them taking tests all the time. Someone needs to kill some of these tests.
There are some college teachers on YouTube complaining about how the kids can’t read entire books.
This and the test anxiety have always been going on with the perfectionist gifted kids. It sucks. It is better medicated than it used to be, but the way they can work themselves up by watching near perfect students on social media talk about how they didn’t get into Stanford.
Suzanne
@Kay:
Ohhhhhh my God. The idea of borrowing fifty thousand dollars for a car makes me shake. I’ve never even borrowed half of that for a car.
I honestly have no issue with paying back the principal on student loans. The interest, OTOH, is fucken evil.
Although one other deeply weird and annoying thing: I enrolled in autopay and elected for no paper communications. Nevertheless, every month, I get a paper statement informing me that my payment is coming up and will be debited from my account. Then, after that’s done, I get another paper statement thanking me for my payment. WTF?! Save the paper and take two dollars off my principal every month.
Anyway
@schrodingers_cat: My first time in London in addition to the popular museums and walking tours I took the train to Cambridge and really enjoyed it — I was a college senior and enamored of academia and research and soaked in the atmosphere. I also caught a West End show on that trip and that was fun too.
On a more recent quick visit it was the decidedly bougie Borough Hall market …
Kay
@NobodySpecial:
My middle son did an electrician apprenticeship – 5 years. He does very well now but he was making next to nothing for five years and there’s horrible hazing and things. They joke apprentices spend five years on a ladder or in a crawlspace. Any route is hard, and especially hard at the beginning.
Kay
@Suzanne:
But its less and less of an issue as you advance in your career right? It becomes a smaller and smaller part of the picture. That’s the beauty of appreciation right there! You borrowed for an asset that appreciates. You are GROWING THE PIE as Republicans used to say, when they were just annoying and not dangerous.
Gloria DryGarden
@Gloria DryGarden: PollyannaFH asked me to mention the skull and bones society at Harvard, ( and elsewhere?)
Meanwhile, more to say on this:
If we’re not willing to note differences between the ivies and elsewhere, and compare and contrast nepotism and other influences between them it’s a kind of bothsidesing,
like we objected to when it was comparisons between two parties in the pre election news barrages.
Meanwhile, I am glad people are contemplating how leadership might develop and arise from non Ivy League sources
.(not counting unqualified tv show personalities; interested in actual leadership)
lowtechcyclist
@Kay:
I remember a lot of people were saying students could borrow money to pay for college, then declare bankruptcy the day after graduation. Poof! Free college.
How realistic that concern was, I have no idea. But there was a LOT of talk about that at the time.
NotMax
re: some of the above
Anyone announcing their vote in advance of confirmation hearings is talking thought their hat, displaying their foolishness for all to see.
Suzanne
@Kay: I have always signed up for income-based repayment plans. Ergo, as I make more money, the government gets more, too. Architects make absolute shit at first. I made less than Mr. Suzanne did in his first year of teaching until I got licensed.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gloria DryGarden: Skull and Bones is at Yale only.
People get jobs at a paper mills and then get picked for better jobs because their dad or uncle works there and is well liked. That’s not at the high end of society. It’s not fair, but going after it is fighting human nature.
Melancholy Jaques
@New Deal democrat:
I’m not so sure of that. While I don’t think high schoolers can name their affiliations, I think many of the ideas that will determine their declared political identity have settled in by high school. Racism, fear of others, fear of change, adherence to strict religious codes, penchant for violence, misogyny, and more. I have seen it in the students I’ve had over the years. I doubt they are much different ten years later when they are voting.
kalakal
@schrodingers_cat: Problem is I haven’t been in London for about 15 years. The British Museum is marvellous, as are the South Kensington ones. St Pauls is a must.
There’s a good museum on the British in India but that’s too far from London in Lancashire. The V & A and the British Museum have an incredible range of Indian items including the Amaravati Marbles which are about 2,500 years old and are sublime.
I was always of fond of the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, where you can also fit in the Old Royal Naval College with it’s amazing Painted Hall, and the Cutty Sark. Hampstead Heath and Hampton Court are good and I love Kew Gardens.
Gloria DryGarden
@Starfish (she/her): im in the school world, and as an assistant, I see some of what teachers have to do. I’ve participated in the testing. I love your rename, no child gets ahead. Teachers feel they have to teach to the test, it interrupts what they’d like to teach and include. The big state test takes two weeks, on e for the test, one for make ups. Half school gets silence signs, and canceled pull out help, to put staff in the tests and the overflow supervision (opt outs, @nd special Ed situations). It affects school numbers, ratings in the district, school choice, whether your school is green, or yellow, or red. It takes up real estate in the minds of administrators.
Good point about homework as a burden for parents, that makes sense, and I bet some teachers aren’t thinking about that aspect.
I’ve been stunned to see kindergartners need to, are expected to finish their year able to write a multi sentence paragraph, with capital letters, and periods. With person, place, action.
like others here, kindergarten for me meant play, painting, and half the alphabet, some numbers. My years in Montessori and Ece showed me some kids counting to 100, doing addition sometimes, and doing carefully orchestrated writing upon return from a field trip. Really rigorous.
Miss Bianca
@Geo Wilcox: I read the same thing, not in a book, but in an article a long time ago. One example that was given was that of bank teller – back when the wage-earning “professional” economy was all-male, teller or clerk/secretary was an entry level position, a stepping stone to higher things – you weren’t expected to remain a clerk or a teller your whole working career. But as soon as women entered the workforce, that’s where they would get stuck – in those entry-level positions. And pay and status was downgraded accordingly.
In addition to those professions that started attracting large numbers of women, such as teaching – teaching became, not a learned profession worthy of respect, but “women’s work.”
sab
@Starfish (she/her): On the other side of testing ( I agree they test much now) my baby sister went off to kindergarden already reading, was so bored on class in first grade that she read all her books in class by the end of September, brought her own nooks for the rest of the year, and didn’t pay much attention to what was goimg on in class.
Our school superintendant was having a feud with the local newspaper that was tryimg to get school performance results, so he stopped all stndardized testing for the whole period Sis was in elementary school.
The school put her in the slow learners class for years. In fifth grade she tested first in the school in reading.( Oops.) Mom yanked her into private school the next year.
Who knows why the school board let tje superintendant do that all those years, but they did.
dnfree
@Kay: This is very true. My husband and I went to a state university in the 1960s, when the state contributed most of the cost. Our families were working-class and we had baby-boom siblings. We would never have gone into debt for college; too risky according to the values we were raised with.
Martin
@Prescott Cactus: Yep.
You need to compare application rates, admittance rates, enrollment and completion rates.
We didn’t see a fall off in applications between men and women. We did see a fall off in admittance among men, because they were much more likely to mismatch to a suitable institution in terms of competitiveness (women were better matched to schools they were competitive with, by a decent amount). They make up a bit of that loss by accepting the offer in slightly higher numbers, and they give all that back and then some by not completing college as frequently. I will note, over 80% of our disciplinary cases were men, and probation rates were somewhat higher among men than women.
Our conclusions were that men weren’t less interested in attending, but are more likely to apply to schools where they aren’t competitive, and in a decent number of cases get locked out. Note: college admission has gotten MUCH more competitive compared to a generation ago, so if they were working off what worked for mom and dad, they were probably fucked. Women in our data were slightly less likely to take the offer – not just at individual schools but overall – choosing to not go to college at all, in our case staying home to help parents was the predominant cause, but our demographic pool wasn’t entirely representative on that front, so that may not apply broadly.
You have to be very careful looking at these analysis to see what they are actually saying. Almost all speak to enrollment, and not intention to go to college. Those are VERY different things. In order to enroll, there are a lot of hoops to jump through, and if you fall through to the community college, trade schools offer competing opportunities to both men and women, but with very gendered differences.
TONYG
@Steve in the ATL: I think that the problem is that educated young women have minds of their own and are not necessarily going to be impressed by some male doofus. Can’t have that!
TONYG
@lowtechcyclist: Yeah, that sounds about right. Actually, even during my college days of a half-century ago, the young women that I knew (and sometimes dated) had already been influenced by “the evils of feminism” and were happy to tell guy to get lost if he was being a jerk. The college-age women now tend to have mothers and grandmothers who are feminists. I guess that does frighten some of the dumber young men, who would rather just watch porn.
Martin
@Marmot: While that may all be true, the harsh reality of college admissions is that we have become extremely sensitive to institutional reputation over time which has created a serious competitive crunch at most notable public and private universities. This problem backs its way all the way back to K-12 performance which requires college-bound students to do more and work harder than they had in the past.
Compounding this problem is how universities have sought to level the playing field for applicants. UC was largely at the forefront of this as CA banned affirmative action in the 90s and developed a focus on squaring up disparities in educational opportunities, largely centered on K-12 funding disparities. This resulted in a disinvestment in standardized testing and greater focus on student resilience and diligence.
When schools are seeking students, the problem you are trying to solve is which students have the academic background that they won’t get lost by the material. When you have more applicants than you can take, that’s not a problem any longer, and your focus shifts to ‘who is serious and hard working’ which isn’t what standardized testing reveals, but grades and other activities do. That’s at least true for institutions whose focus is primarily on graduation rate – making sure seats go to students who will make it though the 4 years, over those who are perhaps academically gifted but not serious.
Ask any middle/high school teacher if boys or girls are better students and they’ll all point to the girls, not because they are smarter, but because they tend to be more responsible, do the work, pay attention, etc. This might be related to frontal lobe development, but that’s overshadowed by cultural factors and that problem is getting worse, not better. Hard work is not a value we cherish as much – getting ahead via some gimmick is – and that’s the opposite of how college admission works. And that feedback loop of what makes a students competitive for universities isn’t working as the public substitute their own theories of things.
When my wife and I went to college, showing up with a good SAT score was good enough, even if you had ‘Ds’ on your transcript. It’s almost impossible to get into a mid-tier public with Ds on your transcript now. Hell, when I retired if you had Cs there better be an explanation for them.
Now, increased funding for universities so they can grow enrollment would go a long way, because we still have big swaths of the educational system where demand isn’t being met, even in a state like California that has over 4 million students in their three public university systems.
Jinchi
This is one of those fantasies that breaks down under the slightest consideration. It’s at the level of the “free-money glitch” TikTok was peddling a few months back. It’s really not that easy to defraud the banks.
BritinChicago
@zhena gogolia: “I wish the word “disinterest” hadn’t been used incorrectly. (pet peeve)”
I’m with you there! I try not to be too much of a linguistic conservative, but we actually need a word meaning what the word “disinterest” used to mean (and still does, some of us think).
m.j.
I’m looking at the graphs.
Someone remind me when Obama was inaugurated.
It’s probably just a coincidence.
brantl
I’d like to find a better name than “anti-intellectualism” to describe that phenomenon.)
How about “professionally stupid”?
Gloria DryGarden
@TONYG: it must be horrible to be surrounded by women who think they are real people with thoughts in their brains, and civil rights, and the right to say no, and who have the ability to take care of themselves, or children, or a family, and don’t need anyone. We’re less like doormats and more like a person next to. (Even if that is a little like the rib Origen story) we can be invited, and interacted with, and treated as persons of value. We might like partnership and collaboration, and a division of labor we set up, rather than feeling so much lesser than and disempowered, that we can’t function without a man.
just thinking of the historic time in the 70s when women got the right to write checks and own credit cards, and I’m not sure what else.
but no, most of us would rather not need or depend on someone in a way that confers uneven power. In fact, as soon as there is a marked power differential, intimate exchange such as sex can hardly be considered consensual.
those poor incels could use some emotional intelligence or social emotional learning; they’d have to up their game.
Eduardo
@scav: yeah, same in Spanish. Probably for that reason I never noticed the difference between disinterested and uninterested. In Spanish “desinteresado” covers both meanings.
NobodySpecial
@Kay: Most college age students ain’t borrowing $50k for a car, because they don’t meet the lending requirements. Period. That’s also the reason they’re not buying homes, either. The money doesn’t money the way it did when you or I were going to college, and banks aren’t nearly as free with car and home money. Student loans, though, are predicated on them being young and low income enough that they’re on the hook for forever if the bank is lucky.
TONYG
@Gloria DryGarden: Yeah. I was a teenager and in my early twenties during the seventies wave of feminism, and my sisters and my female friends were definitely part of that ideology. My understanding is that the hope at that time was that as women obtained more rights then men would adjust to that new reality, and everybody would be happier. That was the case for some men, but apparently many men decided that if they can’t have the “fifties housewife/pornstar” hybrid of their imaginations then they’d rather not deal with women at all. Hence the “incel” phenomenon. I’ve always thought that the term “incel” was inaccurate. Most of these guys are, in effect, VOLUNTARILY celibate — they are, in effect, choosing to be celibate by stupidly, arrogantly rejecting actual women because they are not the fictional women that exist only in their imaginations.
TONYG
@Gloria DryGarden: “Anecdotes are not data but” … I had a conversation recently with a friend who has a daughter in her late twenties. Intelligent, attractive young woman, doing well in her career. My friend said that she tells him that she’s not dating anyone because she can’t “find any guys who aren’t jerks”. I wonder how typical that is. (I have not daughters; married sons in their mid-thirties; myself.)
brantl
@TONYG: Yep, cause the women are smarter than them.
brantl
@Omnes Omnibus: FTW!
brantl
@Kay: Not if it takes $25000 just to live.