NY Times explains college gender gap

The NY Times has published the real college gender gap story, which hans't made the most emailed list like the original article.

The gender divide involves people from lower income famlies (where as I pointed out the men see skilled blue collar jobs as better income opportunities), and older students returning to school who are overwhelmingly female.

The author of the article suggests that, gasp!, older men don't go to college because they have to be the "the family breadwinner."

And one can't help but notice that at the masters degree level, women are earning degrees with lousy income potential:

Women earned about 60 percent of the master’s degrees conferred in 2003-4, but the female majority was due largely to women’s predominance in education, nursing, health and social work, fields that together account for 42 percent of master’s degrees.

The nursing degree is an OK deal (the average salary for a nurse with a master's degree is only $65,000, which isn't all that special--despite the alleged huge shortage of nurses--I guess all of that nurse immigration keeps down wages), but an "education" degree just means the degree holder is a school teacher in a state which requires all of its teachers to obtain a master's degree, and social work is a pitifully low paying field.

Feminists, instead of complaining about the wage gap, ought to be encouraging women to get degrees in subjects that are more economically useful.

Comments

[christy]

a lot of teachers get "masters degrees" from some joke school after they've started teaching because it bumps them up to another pay level, I've heard these degrees are basically fake and no real work is required to get them. What a scam on our taxpayers and children.

[spungen]

Christy is right re teachers and automatic raises for more education. In CA it's called a "step-and-column" raise.

Yet again, the study says nothing about which colleges, their rankings or even if they're accredited. I know many, many people, mostly older women, who are attending online or satellite "colleges," usually working and/or raising families. I suspect that's a big part of this equation.

At my bad state school, the older returning women often seemed to be doing so after a divorce, or as part of some welfare-to-work deal. It probably made sense for them to major in subjects like early childhood education, because those professions, although not high-paying, are at least "woman-friendly," have steady jobs available, and are more flexible. By the time you're in your 30s, most people aren't capable of struggling successfully as a minority in a new environment.

The older guys were usually just stunted weirdos who wanted to be around young people. And there were a lot of them. The exceptions were night students -- ie, a married, working guy with a family who wants a degree because it will help him advance in his job.

[spungen]

Oh, I overlooked this part:

..."finding that the female majority in college enrollment is largest at community colleges and private profitmaking institutions, while men and women each accounted for 50 percent of the undergraduates at public research universities."

That helps a little. I assume online/satellite counts as private profit-making. I don't know where schools with "state" in the title figure in, though. And, it doesn't separate based upon accreditation.

[Joe O]

>Feminists, instead of complaining about the wage gap, ought to be encouraging women to get degrees in subjects that are more economically useful.

Feminists are:

The preparation stage begins with college. It is shocking to think that girls cut off their options for a public life of work as early as college. But they do. The first pitfall is the liberal-arts curriculum, which women are good at, graduating in higher numbers than men. Although many really successful people start out studying liberal arts, the purpose of a liberal education is not, with the exception of a miniscule number of academic positions, job preparation.

[Lab_Frog]

On the performance gender gap issue, there is unlikely any need for action.
Perhaps one reason for the lower results of men in college is that they are less concerned with pleasing the professors and getting along with the system, and more interested in learning what they think is important.
A crude statistical method to see if this is true would be to look at the rate of male and female students who sell back their books, with the assumption that those who sell back their books are more likely to be in college more for grades and credentials rather than to actually learn (all else equal of course, but factors like wealth should be very close to equal).