The Decline in Male Achievement, cont.
May 24, 2010
JOHN P. WRITES:
I’d like to offer a contrarian view of your post on graduation levels of men and women.
If I understand correctly Jesse Powell’s statistics are aggregate graduation rates for all undergraduate degrees. However, most undergraduate degrees are awarded for liberal arts courses, history, psychology, sociology, English, etc. I don’t have the stats handy but I’m pretty sure that if you look at graduation rates for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields you will find they are preponderantly awarded to men.
Moreover, the utility of a liberal arts degree is really quite minimal (I know, I have one). Its economic value is a product of a form of collusion between business and academia. Very few grads are working in fields that genuinely require such qualifications.
The way it works is this: in many jurisdictions, Ontario is one but it wouldn’t surprise me if this is true in places like New York and California, the definition of a “professional” is having a University degree of any kind. The definition of labour is not having a degree. Any business with a preponderance of labour in its workforce may be subject to forced unionisation. Hence the demand for BA’s. There is, thus, a government-created bubble economy in undergraduate education. We also know, as a matter of history, that once and endeavour becomes predominantly female it’s value declines.
So, Jesse’s stats are good news and reflect the ongoing collapse of the education bubble.
Laura writes:
College has been oversold. While the utility of a good liberal arts degree is universal, enhancing the ability to reason and communicate, many students in college today are not obtaining a good liberal arts education and it isn’t required of them anyway. And, as you say, many jobs don’t really require a degree.
But these numbers are still very significant.
Men have always dramatically outnumbered women in the the hard sciences and technology, and continue to do so. If men were simply shifting their effort to those fields then that would be reflected in the numbers. The fact is, their relative participation in higher education as a whole has been steadily decreasing since 1975. In an advanced economy, in which higher education is significantly rewarded and wages for those at lower education levels have been declining, it would make sense that education rates for men would continue to increase at comparable levels as in the past regardless of the intrinsic value of the degrees offered. The value of a field declines in the eyes of men when it becomes female-dominated (and arguably its objective value declines as well), but that doesn’t necessarily mean its monetary value decreases.
For instance, the field of pharmaceutical science is rapidly becoming female-dominated. Men will continue to outnumber women in research, but it may get to the point where there are very few as retail pharmacists. While pharmacists once learned their trade as apprentices, that is obviously no longer possible. There are zero opportunities for men in this field unless they obtain degrees. This is not a field that has no appeal to men. It obviously once did appeal to them and was almost exclusively maintained by men.
It is nice to have someone point out the overlooked obvious, as John has done. My undergraduate degree is in electrical engineering, and my experience with women in the classroom confirms (+1) John P.’s position. As the years went by and the complexity of the program grew to scale, the number of women was reduced to zero. There were no graduating ME’s or EE’s in my class in 1988; although there was one CE. I know the medical fields have a much higher number of graduating females, but based upon what I witnessed, my very rough order guess would still be something less than 15%.
I will admit to being duped, and not being called to remember the glaring differences and disparities, even between the hard and soft science grads. The chances these facts will ever see the larger media light of day have the same chance as vehicles powered by cold fusion. Understanding how the media works today with spin of facts, I am guessing they would call combustion engines cold fusion devices. It is a fact that fuel is often cold when pumped, and it is converted from a liquid into a gaseous form. And the sound of an Austin Martin Vanquish V12 is cool music to my ears, or perverted; cool fusion.
Unfortunately my graduate studies (constitutional law) are polluted with leftist Socialists who render high school thesis work, and make careers of deconstruction. Most of these more recent classes are composed largely of women.
Jesse Powell (formerly identified as Jesse) writes:
With regard to John P.’s comments, the statistics I cited did refer to all undergraduate degrees. Furthermore, they refer to the college graduate rate, meaning all those who earned a bachelor’s degree or higher. John seems to be making the claim that the value of a college degree in practical terms, other than in the science related STEM fields where men predominate, is quite minimal. The statistics on earnings do not support this assertion.
Comparing earnings by education level in 1973 and 2007, a man who only graduated from high school saw his earnings drop 9.4% while if he earned a bachelor’s degree his earnings increased by 18.1%. For women who only graduated from high school their earnings increased by 10.8% and for those who earned a bachelor’s degree their earnings increased by 29.4%. This is in addition to the income benefits that already existed in 1973 for those who earned a bachelor’s degree. In 1973, men with a bachelor’s degree earned 37.9% more than men with only a high school diploma. For women in 1973 the differential was 49.7%.
(My data source for the above is the table on earnings by education level given in “The Decline in Male Achievement” thread.)
John mentions a government-created distortion in the labor market, that businesses with a high number of “laborers,” those without college degrees, are at risk of being forced to accept the unionization of their workers. His reference to Ontario makes me think he lives in Canada and is referring to government practices in Canada. I don’t know the details of how things work in Canada but the numbers I cite above describing how those with a bachelor’s degree earn much more than those with only a high school degree refer to wage rates in the United States. I know in the United States the number of unionized workers fell dramatically from 1973 to 2007, and furthermore I don’t know of any governmentally imposed preference that workers without a college education be unionized more so than workers with a college education.
John’s assertion that my stats are good news because they reflect the ongoing collapse of the “education bubble” makes no sense. The “education bubble” is even stronger today than it was in 1973. The monetary payoff to earning a bachelor’s degree was higher in 2007 than it was in 1973. If anything the importance and value of getting a college education has grown during the time period when women increased their graduation rates relative to men, not lessened.
