In the past fifty years, colleges have gone from being predominantly male to predominantly female. Here are figures from Leonard Sax’s book Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Men:

1949: 70 percent of undergraduate students were male
1959: 64 percent were male
1969: 59 percent were male
1979: 49 percent were male
1989: 46 percent were male
1999: 44 percent were male
2006: 42 percent were male

                        — Comments —

Fitzgerald writes:

I would like to see a breakdown on what “degrees” these women are earning. I can tell you few are in the engineering and other disciplines actually involved in innovation and wealth creation as these are the industries I work in and I work with 95%+ males. In 20 years I have yet to work with a single woman architect or senior technologist that wasn’t simply a bureaucrat or manager, although I have worked with mangers and lower level functionaries who are excellent and quite competent at managing projects or simple systems, so do not read this as a misogynist’s screed. For an exception, go to Wikipedia and look up Rear Adm. Grace Hopper, she’s the exception to the reality that men overwhelmingly dominate the upper tiers of the engineering and technical ranks because they are best suited for it by their makeup and dispositions. 

I would assert the lion share of “degrees” women are obtaining effectively prepare them to be little more than bureaucratic mandarins. Our country is churning out scores of degreed women, puffed up with self-importance and yet their roles are largely parasitic. What value and wealth are they creating? None. Worse yet, their propensity for avoiding risk and pursuit of security is the exact opposite of what we need economically. Dual-earning families created by scores of newly degreed women entering the workforce are largely responsible for the massive housing bubble in the last 10-15 years. Women and their innate nesting instincts and need for the security of a home and hearth drive much of the housing demand that drove up the costs once the couple had more money to spend, not to let men off the hook for going along. It’s not an accident that the tradition of a man removing his hat when entering a house is out of respect for the woman of the house. Guys could care less if you were a hat indoors. I found this out the hard way when a traditional lady literally strode up moments after I entered her house and smacked my cap off of my head. She was most displeased… I of course, apologized profusely and always remembered to remove my hat on future visits. 

Now, feminists objecting strenuously to my “reactionary” statements would surely state housewives are the biggest parasites of all. I say; nay, nay! Housewives are actually involved in cultivating the greatest and most profound form of wealth and societal expansion, namely the procreation and nurturing of the next generation. On top of that hugely important fact, it’s hardly even worth mentioning the enormous economic advantages provided to a child rearing couple by a stay-at-home parent. I can attest directly to this reality; my ex-wife took off and I’m raising my brood alone. The amount of extra money I have to shell out to partially compensate for a committed housewife is stultifying and I don’t even use daycare as I work from home when not on the road (consultant) and my parents, God bless them, watch them for me when I travel.

Laura writes:

These figures need to be placed in some perspective. More men attend trade school and go into the trades. More men go into the military. These facts clearly affect the differences, as does the influence of the G.I. bill right after the war.

Over the past forty years, colleges launched a very succcessful campaign to attract women. And women by their very nature tend to like school. As Fitzgerald says, many of these degrees are essentially high-priced junk that merely grant a woman certification to enter any number of positions as corporate drudges. Many are degrees in education and social work. Men dramatically outnumber women in engineering fields. However, half of all medical degrees are now obtained by women and, if I’m not mistaken, half of all law degrees.

Nevertheless, there appears to be a widespread perception on college campuses that the men are much more apathetic than in the past. As I said in an earlier post, this is a natural outcome of female assertiveness and the sexual revolution. Where women dominate, men withdraw. As for the sexual revolution, it used to be that a man had to show some initiative and exertion to have an ongoing sexual relationship with a decent woman during his twenties. (In other words, he had to get married.) Now, a significant motivating factor for men has been removed.

Please follow and like us: