As More US Men Abandon Higher Education, Are Admissions Officers Discriminating Against Women? (nytimes.com) 398
The Wall Street Journal reports an interesting observation about America. "Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels."
Slashdot reader Joe_Dragon shared their report: At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.
This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years... In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.
But numbers can be misleading. New York Times reporter Kevin Carey points out that more American men are going to college now than they were decades ago — but the percentage of women now going to college has just increased even faster, "more than doubling over the last half-century." Because of the change in ratio, some selective colleges discriminate against women in admissions to maintain a gender balance, as The Journal reported... In a New York Times essay in 2006 titled "To All the Girls I've Rejected," the dean of admissions at Kenyon College at the time explained: "Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive."
The Journal even reported that a former admissions officer at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon "said this kind of tacit affirmative action for boys has become 'higher education's dirty little secret,' practiced but not publicly acknowledged by many private universities where the gender balance has gone off-kilter."
But even with more women in college, the Times argues that "The raw numbers don't take into account the varying value of college degrees." (And not just because "The female-to-male gender ratio is highest in for-profit colleges, which often overcharge students for worthless degrees.")
"Men still dominate in fields like technology and engineering, which offer some of the highest salaries for recent graduates..." Women surged into college because they were able to, but also because many had to. There are still some good-paying jobs available to men without college credentials. There are relatively few for such women. And despite the considerable cost in time and money of earning a degree, many female-dominated jobs don't pay well...
The fact that the male-female wage gap remains large after more than four decades in which women outnumbered men in college strongly suggests that college alone offers a narrow view of opportunity. Women often seem stuck in place: As they overcome obstacles and use their degrees to move into male-dominated fields, the fields offer less pay in return.
Slashdot reader Joe_Dragon shared their report: At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.
This education gap, which holds at both two- and four-year colleges, has been slowly widening for 40 years... In the next few years, two women will earn a college degree for every man, if the trend continues, said Douglas Shapiro, executive director of the research center at the National Student Clearinghouse.
But numbers can be misleading. New York Times reporter Kevin Carey points out that more American men are going to college now than they were decades ago — but the percentage of women now going to college has just increased even faster, "more than doubling over the last half-century." Because of the change in ratio, some selective colleges discriminate against women in admissions to maintain a gender balance, as The Journal reported... In a New York Times essay in 2006 titled "To All the Girls I've Rejected," the dean of admissions at Kenyon College at the time explained: "Beyond the availability of dance partners for the winter formal, gender balance matters in ways both large and small on a residential college campus. Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive."
The Journal even reported that a former admissions officer at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, and Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon "said this kind of tacit affirmative action for boys has become 'higher education's dirty little secret,' practiced but not publicly acknowledged by many private universities where the gender balance has gone off-kilter."
But even with more women in college, the Times argues that "The raw numbers don't take into account the varying value of college degrees." (And not just because "The female-to-male gender ratio is highest in for-profit colleges, which often overcharge students for worthless degrees.")
"Men still dominate in fields like technology and engineering, which offer some of the highest salaries for recent graduates..." Women surged into college because they were able to, but also because many had to. There are still some good-paying jobs available to men without college credentials. There are relatively few for such women. And despite the considerable cost in time and money of earning a degree, many female-dominated jobs don't pay well...
The fact that the male-female wage gap remains large after more than four decades in which women outnumbered men in college strongly suggests that college alone offers a narrow view of opportunity. Women often seem stuck in place: As they overcome obstacles and use their degrees to move into male-dominated fields, the fields offer less pay in return.
The title (Score:5, Insightful)
The title of this article is a good summary of why men are leaving. "Men feel they're being marginalized." "Oh my God! We need to find out how this is harming women!"
Re:The title (Score:5, Insightful)
But men aren't leaving
> New York Times reporter Kevin Carey points out that more American men are going to college now than they were decades ago — but the percentage of women now going to college has just increased even faster, "more than doubling over the last half-century
Re:The title (Score:5, Insightful)
The population is double what it was decades ago.
That sentence from the NY times is a duplicitous way of saying "when normalized for population growth, fewer men and more women are going to college."
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The population in the US is growing steadily but it has taken 80 years to double to what it is today. Unless the article (paywalled) is comparing college admission rates to the 1960s, I don't think your analysis is valid. US Demographics [wikipedia.org]
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Last I checked my Math, 80 years is eight decades, so systemd-anonymousd is right and you are not.
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Um... shouldn't you compare "percentage of men to percentage of women"?
Re:The title (Score:5, Interesting)
But men aren't leaving
> New York Times reporter Kevin Carey points out that more American men are going to college now than they were decades ago — but the percentage of women now going to college has just increased even faster, "more than doubling over the last half-century
And that's how you know that writer is a biased tabloid journalist. "Fewer men are enrolling, but let's instead compare that number to the dark ages when no man enrolled ever". If you look at the previous paragraph you'll see that the writer was lying to promote an agenda.
At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 million fewer students compared with five years ago, and men accounted for 71% of the decline.
There are 1.5 million fewer students than five years ago. The writer is a lying weasel.
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Why else do you think tuition has tripled in the last several decades?
Because more people want in and colleges can get away with demanding it because if you offer a product everyone wants and will have to pay whatever your asking price is you can up the price to whatever you like?
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Why else do you think tuition has tripled in the last several decades?
Because more people want in and colleges can get away with demanding it because if you offer a product everyone wants and will have to pay whatever your asking price is you can up the price to whatever you like?
In other words: 'capitalism 101'.
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Right - colleges are governed as bureaucracies, not as capitalist entities (barring for-profit degree mills). Bureaucracy's end game is always to grow the bureaucracy. It's a forever expanding blob that chokes all the money out of the real work, requiring more money. As it expands more and more, it requires more and more resources to manage itself, requiring it to expand even more.
This is why college is expensive. Because the bureaucrats in charge don't care so long as they can grow the bureaucracy.
More complicated than it appears (Score:2)
I'd argue that it's more than just that. It's still basic economic theory though.
Some products scale pretty much infinitely. Once you're making a million toasters a year, you can scale that up to 300M, and each toaster is likely to be slightly cheaper, not more expensive.
Some products will eventually hit limits. Caviar, for example, would eventually require you to run Sturgeon farms specifically to get egg filled fish in order to harvest the roe. As you attempt to harvest them wild, of course, costs inc
Re:The title (Score:4)
Its tripled because the government guarantees loans to anyone who wants to go to college. This is effectively free money for the colleges. The students don't care or don't understand the impact when they are 18 and the colleges can ask for whatever they want. This has driven costs upwards year over year. If we want to lower costs then we need to shut down the gravy train and reform how federal student loans work.
Re: The title (Score:4, Insightful)
Then what's the solution?
You've said it yourself in a different post - the "socialist" Europe way, where education is paid for by taxes money.
It's beyond me how a presumably enlightened society can have anything else and hope to stay enlightened.
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I think it might be hard to convince the current generation that they not only should pay back their own student loans but also pay it forward for the next generation with taxes. That's basically the social contract here, you get your education for free, but you're paying for the next generation when you actually earn money.
Re:The title (Score:5, Informative)
Why else do you think tuition has tripled in the last several decades?
Student loans are easier to get.
Jobs that didn't require a piece of paper, now require that piece of paper.
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"Why else do you think tuition has tripled in the last several decades?"
It varies so it is better to look at the school's budget. Where i work in higher-ed the funding changed drastically over the last 30 years. (Public college) 30 years ago the state covered about 2/3 of the cost and tuition covered the other 1/3. Gradually that changed as the states reduced funding and allowed the college's to increase tuition to make up the difference. Tuition increasing can be a misleading number to use. Sure, it di
Wage Gap Debunked (Score:4, Insightful)
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Maybe there is. They wouldn't spill their trade secret, and thus we may not know about it. They don't have to hire only women, but about 65% to fly under the radar. It's like the old saying: if stock consultants were any good at picking stock, they wouldn't be consultants.
no shit (Score:4, Insightful)
Men have non-college jobs unavailable to women? Like what? NFL player? Sperm donor? Any plumbing or electrical contractor would be glad to hire a woman, it's not men's fault that women don't take those jobs.
Same with women who choose not to study engineering. Many many women in countries like Iran study engineering, know why? Because engineering jobs pay well so it gives them economic security.
I also find it hard to believe that a man would not want to go to a college that is slightly more female balanced. There are still plenty of men to hang out with and it makes dating a million times easier.
Lastly this summary is saying a lot of contradictory things at once - the gender imbalance isn't real because a lot of women are at fake for-profit colleges, also colleges large and small are discriminating against women because they don't want to be an unofficial women's college.
For what it's worth, Stanford's class of 2024 is 52/48 women to men. A slight difference. It will need to be 55/45 to have a meaningful difference in dating opportunities. To the class of 2030, I say godspeed - may you fuck so much your dick gets rugburn.
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Any plumbing or electrical contractor would be glad to hire a woman, it's not men's fault that women don't take those jobs.
It is, however, men's fault that many women are pushed out of those jobs due to the rampant sexual harassment.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/wome... [go.com]
Williams says she endured all kinds of lewd comments and gestures. "When you didn't respond to them properly, you were always called a bitch, whore, slut," she said. "I'm not understanding how [I was being treated this way] if I'm pay
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Also some traditionally female jobs like school teacher pay substantially less than historically male jobs.
This was actually by design. And time has not solved the problem.
Wait until you hear about asians... (Score:5, Interesting)
If you think women are getting the shaft, just take a look at the way asians are being treated.
Pretty much across the board at places like Harvard, there is massive discrimination of enrolling too many asians by weighting things like SAT scores lower than other races.
Here you have blatant racial discrimination, but no-one seems to care...
This is also why a number of collages are moving away from acceptance criteria that have anything to do with test scores, because those make racial discrimination way too easy to see.
Re:Wait until you hear about asians... (Score:5, Interesting)
>"If you think women are getting the shaft, just take a look at the way asians are being treated."
I was going to post the same thing.
What I find amusing is that I am guessing that somehow many would think discriminating against men would be OK, but against women would not be? Discriminating against Asians or Whites would be OK but not Blacks?
Call me old fashioned, but how about we don't discriminate based on immutable characteristics at all and focus on people as individuals and their grades, transcripts, activities, scores, and achievements.
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Re:Wait until you hear about asians... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the "liberal" way. Don't do the real work necessary to deal with the problems, just implement a lazy "solution" to make you feel better that looks like it is solving the problem. Then when called out for being lazy, just cry racism, sexism, *phobia or some other red herring to draw attention away from your half-assed, and bigoted "solution".
Re: Wait until you hear about asians... (Score:2)
The difference is that while we know the conservatives are hypocritical assholes, we expect the liberals to not be.
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>were all set up at a time when white males dominated everything
Whooosh! let's rewrite history
Re:Wait until you hear about asians... (Score:5, Insightful)
"If everything is equal now, should we do something about all time it wasn't equal?"
No. We shouldn't.
We should instead do what we can to lift up the poor, whoever they happen to be, and create a society that works for everybody.
Trying to "even the score" has never worked to create a just society. Revenge has not ever worked in the history of society.
We should very clearly and unambiguously assert non-racism and the values of non-racism, and create a society of non-racism.
Lingering effects of historic racism should be met through broad uplift of the people most in distress in society, no matter their race or color.
Exactly as Martin Luther King taught, and for the very reasons that he explained.
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The problem with just saying "okay, no more racism from now on" is that it does nothing to actually uplift the poor or make up for historic injustices.
At the moment for every $100 of wealth that the average white family has, the average black family has $13. Much of that is because of the GI Act and racism that prevented black people from taking advantage of it to buy property, which has greatly increased in value.
If nothing at all is done it will take over a century for black people affected by that to cat
Re:Wait until you hear about asians... (Score:5, Insightful)
>"Ah yes, the old "everything is equal now so everything is fine".
Nothing is ever equal. Welcome to life. But it is what civilized people should strive for- the equality of rights and opportunity, not outcomes.
>"If everything is equal now, should we do something about all time it wasn't equal?"
Absolutely not. There is no way you can right the wrongs of the past except to try strive to equality of opportunity now. Unless you think that innocent people should "pay" for the sins of other people by taking from them based on immutable characteristics and give what you take to others who did nothing to earn it based on their immutable characteristics. THAT *IS* RACISM, SEXISM, AGEISM, etc. Far from fixing anything, what that does is PROMOTE false victimhood, resentment, apathy, racism, sexism, and mediocracy.
If you go back far enough, almost every human has experienced "unfairness" in their families' history.
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Some Asian families want their kids to be accepted and get mad when they are not. Given the texas ruling it depends on who is considered a preferred class. White women, white men, Asians.
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The problem is that some groups are more vocal than others, and they don't want equality - they want inequality that's in their favor.
Some people are willing to work hard to succeed. Others just want a free ride, and since they're not working they have plenty of time on their hands to complain and kick up a fuss.
Re:Wait until you hear about asians... (Score:4, Interesting)
asians by weighting things like SAT scores lower than other races.
Could it be like here in Australia, where Asian migrants have kind of broken standardised testing as a means of selecting high aptitude students?
We have selective public high schools, with entry based on an aptitude test that is a bit like SAT, and many of the schools are now dominated by children of recent migrants from South and East Asia. This is expected to some extent, as the migrants are chosen for skills and education, and yes, intelligence is hereditary, and many lack the money for top private schools.
But often the kids spend years at after-school private coaching classes. Older Australian families (including those of Asian heritage) are not willing to subject their children to that.
My kid managed to get into one of these schools, barely passing the entry score after many weeks of practice tests (rather than years of coaching classes). Yet she is performing better than average with so special effort. Asian culture has made the tests as much a score of grinding perseverance and lost childhood as of aptitude. - or at least, that is the fear. Having now met a lot of those kids, most seem quite normal and well adjusted to me.
Re:Wait until you hear about asians... (Score:5, Interesting)
My kid managed to get into one of these schools, barely passing the entry score after many weeks of practice tests (rather than years of coaching classes). Yet she is performing better than average with so special effort. Asian culture has made the tests as much a score of grinding perseverance and lost childhood as of aptitude. - or at least, that is the fear. Having now met a lot of those kids, most seem quite normal and well adjusted to me.
That is exactly what is happening in the US. If you admit students based on test score, you are essentially admitting student with the financial resources to take test-prep courses. Not necessarilly the best students.
Of course to get pefect score you have to be somewhat gifted and motivated, it is not JUST a question of taking the prep course. But when you talk to student, you can tell the difference between the "I got top 5% because I worked every week end on it" and the "I got top 25% by showing up between my shift at target and picking up my brother." The second kind is MUCH better!
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This
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Actually, test prep does not lead to higher test scores unless you're East Asian. [nytimes.com] Quote:
“East Asian Americans were the only group where a form of test prep predicted a higher SAT score (about 50 points).” For everyone else, SAT prep has no significant effect or even, in some cases, a negative one.
Selection bias (Score:3)
I'd argue that the problem you might see here is that with middle class white americans (my group), you get a selection bias. IE, on average, parents only enter their kids into extensive test prep if they see an oncoming problem. Asians may do it much more as a matter of course.
Basically, East Asians probably send their best kids to test prep in order to cement their position, while White Americans probably send their kids who they're afraid won't make it; IE their worst.
That is an opinion article, after
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Some cultures assume that anyone can learn anything with enough effort, while others assume that people have some level of natural ability/talent which cannot be exceeded. In the former case passing any test is just a case of grinding the books hard enough, in the latter if you just aren't good at maths then there isn't all that much you can do about it.
Japan and China tend towards the former, the West tends towards the latter.
Neither is right really. Most people probably can master almost anything with eno
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Most people probably can master almost anything with enough effort,
I don't agree at all. Not even a little bit. I wouldn't even say most people can become basically competent at anything with enough effort. Dyslexia, innumeracy, there are lots of reasons why it's not true. This whole trying to make everyone identical to everyone else thing is bullshit. We are not all identical, we do not all have the same aptitudes, and these mental gymnastics used to attempt to believe otherwise are a poor substitute for creating a society that doesn't throw people into the abyss simply f
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I should have phrased that better. I think most people can get a decent school level education, even with learning disabilities. Of course it's much harder with those disabilities and I question the value in trying to force anyone, disability or not, to reach that level by age 16 or 18.
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The same issue occurred with Jews in the 1930's at elite US colleges: it was called the "Jewish Quota". And I'm afraid you're correct about why some colleges are discarding test scores.
Re: Wait until you hear about asians... (Score:5, Interesting)
Per I believe the Asian Policy Project (it's been many moons since I read the book), if Asians were held to the same standards as other applicants, west coast schools would be 80% Asian across the board.
Further, one of the dirty little secrets of affirmative action is that other minority admissions stayed pretty much the same. The primary beneficiaries were white women.
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You know what Harvard would look like if they went straight by SAT scores? Like a Chinese university. With 90% Asians, 10% Caucasian and a statistical rounding error of "the rest".
You think they'd get some racism outcry for that? Hmm?
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That sounds fine to me. If the Asians are better, they deserve the spots and the quality of graduates will improve. That said i don't believe at all they would dominate as much because of several reasons. Asians are not that good, it is just that their immigration is a rather educated and hard working one. They tend to keep their uneducated at home. If the numbers were too skewed towards foreigners there would be a tightening of quota policy. And there are not that many Asian Americans.
Besides, as the Asian
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My university pretty much had no admission criteria. You want in (and have a high school diploma), you get in. Welcome. And it being almost free (yay socialist Europe) meant that a lot want in.
Which also translates to merciless testing. Because it's not like they're in any way dependent on you. You quitting only means that the prof has more time to actually do some sensible research instead of trying to get something through your skull that ain't no bullet. And sometimes they don't even try to hide that the
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The statistics do not lie, the asian student body admitted to Harvard have much higher SAT scores than any other racial group.
It really highlights that nature does not like mono-cultures at all. Mixed gene groups are strong gene groups, be it humans or wheat.
ah yes, the old song and dance... (Score:3, Insightful)
men getting excluded from higher education, women most affected.
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I'd like to see the trend for trade schools. Are there more women pursuing trade? Right now it's either higher education or fast food career. Trades don't get mentioned in anyone's study.
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Trade school in Australia arguably offers more opportunities than a career in something like software engineering.
All figures below in AUD which equals about 0.74 USD today.
Every time I get a plumber out to change a washer in my apartment it's a $200 minimum first hour and $12 an hour after that. Electrical work is also similarly expensive, if not more so, and independent contactors can easily charge $120 an hour. Eg. a 4 air conditioner install took the one guy a little less than 2 days and cost $2800 for
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I am torn on what I hope for on that. My general advice is that skilled trades are a great place to go but I might want my friends’ kids to go to university and get STEM degrees.
We place far too much emphasis on college, but at the same time, college can teach people lessons that otherwise require tremendous time and pain outside an academic environment.
Some of the smartest, well read people I have known were career electricians.
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I'd like to see the trend for trade schools. Are there more women pursuing trade?
Interestingly, no one seems to care about jobs
1) where women are already over-represented (nurses, young kid education) or
2) jobs that are relatively less desirable (garbage collectors, coal miners)
So good luck finding a study on something that doesn't fit the "patriarchy is keeping women down" narrative.
You should try to think of who is underrepresented and why you aren't attracting that demographic. Try to attract men to nursing and education. Try attracting women to trades, engineering, IT. Only one of those two efforts seems to be controversial, that's interesting. We're all competing for labor, so act like it, and go tilt at those feminism windmills somewhere else loser.
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Ok, I bite, what's controversial about either of them?
Admission requirements should be more transparent (Score:2)
If they had a standardized series of tests, that would be much better than the arbitrary process that has crept into place now at many top colleges. What admissions officers claim is some BS about how they are trying to build a certain student body. So, for example, they might want only 5 entrepreneur-type students and 5 math-genius types. At the same time, they say applying early doesn't matter. So, in other words, they'll, I can only assume, take 5 math geniuses and leave out 20 others who are just as goo
Re:Admission requirements should be more transpare (Score:4, Insightful)
In theory the "let's have an objective test for admission" (or even hiring in a company) sounds very good.
In practice, it is more complicated than that. There is no good test that you can administer. As soon as you have a test, students with more resources will heavily study for it. And that's a problem, because you want to find who will be the best at being a surgeon, not not can afford to spend more time cramming for the test.
And that's a common problem. As soon as you have a formal test, you have crafted a metric that will be optimized. In admissions and everywhere.
In practice it is important to have a balance in your student body. In some majors more directly important than others, but in general it is important. If you have natural abilities are roughly equally distributed, if your student population does not represent your local population, then it probably means that you are leaving some really smart people on the table. Even if they don't perform on a stupid test.
Re:Admission requirements should be more transpare (Score:5, Insightful)
As soon as you have a test, students with more resources will heavily study for it. And that's a problem, because you want to find who will be the best at being a surgeon, not not can afford to spend more time cramming for the test.
I respectfully disagree. The standardized test are not capable of testing "who is best at being surgeon". If we ever invent that, that'd be great. At best, standardized tests can evaluate who spent time to prepare/study and who did not. Yes, a private tutor will offer an advantage. But you can get a good-not-perfect score if you study with no tutoring help.
Removing a standardized test from consideration because it may have been optimized-for offers less information.
By all means, consider the overall student application and not just standard tests. But abolishing or ignoring the tests is shooting yourself in the foot as it introduces even more guesswork into choosing the right applicants.
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Most places are not removing the test; though some are.
In practice practice considering the test score without using ONLY the test scores is what admission officers are doing.
A place like standford is having the problem that you have 300 spots and get 2000 perfectly qualified applications. How do you pick? It does become quite random.
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Self repairing problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Once the word gets out that colleges have more women than men, I am sure men will be more motivated to go to college. I think this will be a self-repairing problem. No need to take any action other than announce the gender gap in college attendance.
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No, it works the other way. Men avoid female dominated subjects. Odd for horny teenage boys, but it is what we observe every single time. Once a subject starts having more than 50% women, the number of male applicants drop fast.
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I was just trying to be funny. But do you think this result applies to college as a whole, also? If admissions allows a majority of women, would this drive men away from college in general? Can we extrapolate a finding about classes to college attendance as a whole? Mind you I am not saying I don't believe it. I am just saying it may not be exactly the same thing.
You're kidding, right? (Score:5, Insightful)
So for 50 years we have set-asides, special scholarships, and encouraging programs to get women into colleges because they're underrepresented, they don't have as many opportunities, etc, etc ad nauseum.
Now, when women are THE MAJORITY in higher education the question is...how can we describe this as unfair to women, again? Seriously?
The ENTIRE justification for all of these women-favoring programs was demographic. Now that the demographics are in their favor, none of them are going away and we're trying desperately to figure out some new way to frame women as victims.
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Look at chemical and computer engineering .. very few women go into it .. why? (of course it goes the other way for early childhood education, animal sciences etc).
Reference: https://www.chicagotribune.com... [chicagotribune.com]
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Because of the old joke:
Job plans with 20: Something with people!
Job plans with 30: Rocks are great company, too...
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The key, to me, is that none of those things are inferior jobs. Everybody can agree that childhood education is one of the most important things in the world for humanity. Yet somehow, "feminists", of all people, consider women who want to do such jobs "inferior" and "brainwashed into accepting lower jobs". And they "should" like engineering jobs and such. ... What if those jobs simply are not fun to them??
It is not a lower job!!
We just invested much less research and professionalism into it!!
In the freakin
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Shows you don't know anything about "childhood education" courseloads.
Whom do you wish teaching your children math? A math major, or an education major? If you answered "math major", move to the head of the class.
"Childhood education"-related degrees do little to prepare a prospective teacher to actually teach the subject matter at hand competently.
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It's now unfair against women because colleges send them away in the name of "equality".
We have to get rid of equality, face it. It's unfair.
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The reason that men aren't interested in academics is that they've given up on themselves. They have been beaten down.
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Depression certainly is an issue many men face today. We really need some men's lib, just like women had. Simply not measuring up to an unrealistic model of masculinity is not a failure.
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LOL at anyone who thinks "unrealistic models of masculinity" have anything to do with it. "Men's lib" would only make it worse.
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What do you think is the cause? And why would men's lib make it worse?
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He sounds like an incel.
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Speaking as a man, I find the entire 'whinging for other people to give us something' whether that's respect, jobs, etc just sounds repellent.
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The reason that men aren't interested in academics is that they've given up on themselves. They have been beaten down.
By whom? Those big scary girls? Couldn't have anything to do with getting a hundred grand in debt, graduating, and then receiving job offers for $12 an hour...
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But it's not even the case. Yes, more women are studying now. No, that doesn't mean we get equal gender statistics in every field. You have a lot more female doctors, architects and biologists now. That's true. If you look at STEM, it's a very different matter.
Ok, not so much with mathematics. But as soon as electricity is involved...
Women are still rare in engineering. For what reason, I don't know. Maybe biology and math is more interesting to them, even though I couldn't identify a reason why. Maybe ner
Re:You're kidding, right? (Score:4, Funny)
I would like to have seen an elaboration on which jobs specifically, in 2021, do not admit women to work in them.
Joey: That's like a woman wanting to be a...
Ross: A what? A What? What's the end of that sentence?
Monica: Yes, what is the end of that sentence?
Joey: Ummm. a penis model.
No (Score:2)
You're not going to convince more women to study technology until all the slashdot neckbeards grow old and retire.
You can't admit more women when they refuse to apply.
Trades (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
There's literally nothing stopping women from going into trades like electrician, plumber, etc. Also, labour jobs in factories around here are very often filled 50% by women.
Part of the challenge is convincing people that a skilled trade is a very viable, and often more lucrative, career option than college. As long as getting a degree is overvalued and skilled trades undervalued society will have problems; neither their philosophy or plumbing will hold water.
What are all these low skilled jobs that are only available to men?
Sperm donor?
Wages go down when labor supply rises? Wow (Score:2)
At some point we're going to have to notice that the "wage gap" is just how capital hides scabbing under affirmative action.
The reason is simple (Score:2)
Oh FFS this isn't new (Score:3)
So while many STEM fields might be sausage parties, that's basically the case until women figure out there's a good paycheck involved. Even then, it is a battle to get them to enroll no matter what you roll out as an incentive.
By the by, one of my other friends is a tenured sociologist at a public university out West. She is arguing we need to get more men (white and especially men of color) into college NOW. Not tomorrow, not ten years from today, but NOW. As in start giving out a shiatload of incentives, especially to men of color and poor whites, but RIGHT NOW GOSH DARN IT ALL, RIGHT-FRACKING-NOW!
She's worried because, as you know, a really stable society always has a large swath of it's male population undereducated, with few good paying employment options available to them to make a living / help support a family.
As she put it: (paraphrasing) Civil Wars start like this folks. Wars that often kill the country with the problem. At the very least it destroys the entire political system, especially the entrenched political class. Not in a good way either, imagine going down the street and seeing your local (Democratic / Republican) State Representative and/or Senator hanging from a tree along with their families and other "rich" people who didn't flee fast enough. That's what happens. Think like the movie "The Purge" but not organized, and more chaotic than the French Revolution.
She's worried about that being a very real possibility within a generation or two.
People, not just men, are waking up (Score:3)
Higher Ed in the USA is a scam. The government, in its infinite wisdom, decided to guarantee student loans. Meaning that anyone could get one and the university would be guaranteed repayment of that loan. Unlike any other type of loan, the student loan cannot be discharged via bankruptcy. Students in many cases are saddled with decades of repayments.
At the same time, financially naive students see this as free money. In the old days you used to get a summer job and save money for college. Now they just borrow the money. Universities quickly saw the appetite for these easy loans and began rapidly raising tuitions, far beyond inflation or any real associated costs.
The business community has a role to play here as well. Jobs that never required a Bachelor degree all of a sudden require it. Companies stopped training people and pushed that back to the universities. This artificial demand for degrees just feeds into the demand for student loans and the cycle continues.
The colleges like it because they have guaranteed loans and can charge as much as they like for tuition. Despite the fact that nearly all schools receive some government funding the government does not appear to want to exert any oversight by controlling much tuitions can go up.
Businesses like it because they can absolve themselves of training and choose from a pool of higher educated potential employees.
Students like it because they can borrow seemingly unlimited sums of money to pursue their education. Until they realize that their degree is in many cases worthless in landing them a job and they are still saddled with enormous amounts of debt.
I think a lot of people are coming to this realization and just skipping the whole college thing and starting a business or pursuing a trade. Trades like electrician or plumber makes it quite easy to be your own boss and charge high rates and enjoy the many tax advantages of an LLC. Unless you are studying medicine or engineering or accounting or law, college is at this point a suckers game.
The Problem: Equity Misdefined as "Not White Male" (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a Mexican-American male well into my career and I've been either a student or an employee of my University system for the last 21 years. The first part of my career gave me an intimate insight into college admissions.
For the first 10 years or so, the focus was to "help those who had lesser privilege/access" get into our schools and I don't think anyone would disagree with that focus. If you grew up poor, you'd get help. If you came from a crappy neighborhood with crappy schools, you'd get some leniency in admissions criteria. Same with being the gender minority (woman), sexuality (LGBT), and on and on-- If those aspects of your identity resulted in hardships in your upbringing and you could show how you overcame those difficulties, then you'd get bonus points on your application. (Resiliency is a common trait of successful college students.)
The last 10 years, though, has seen a blatant sea-change in peoples' comfort in speaking about how THEY interpret the goals of this endeavor though. "We have too many white males". "We need more women." "We need more 'People of Color'." They have an ideal of what the campus could/should look like in its population and it's heavily burdened with the idea that "white males had their shot". All of this in the name of "equity" and righting historic wrongs.
This is very wrong-headed and explicitly racially and sexually discriminatory. Luckily, when my University system recently attempted to remove legislative restrictions preventing it from re-instituting race quotas, they were shot down. But the pressure from within the University continues.
At the crux of the issue is the irrational belief that the fairest University admissions system would result in a campus population that mirrors the racial, gender, religious, and sexuality make-up of the state and that those proportions would show themselves again in each of the majors. I understand where they're coming from with that bad assumption, but it fully ignores upbringing and the effects that has on educational preferences and goals.
It is much more likely that 18 years of traditional gender pressures steer girls away from most STEM majors than the campus being systemically exclusive of girls in STEM majors.
It is much more likely that Black boys have such severe experiences growing up Black in America, that their academic goals are steered by the desire to improve the state of being for other Black boys and thus they don't go into Accounting with the same frequency with which they go into Black American Studies, Political Science, and Law.
In fact, I'm pretty sure if we were to survey everyone of this year's first-year students, I'm pretty sure that 99.9% of them will say that they selected their major because (1) they're interested in the topic, (2) it's most likely the major they wanted but couldn't get into, and (3) it's what my parents want me to study. Only an exceedingly small amount will say, "Because I felt like the University excluded me from my actual desire of studying Computer Science despite my completed prerequisites."
Re: (Score:2)
Are you sure that such a thing as a "pure meritocracy" exists? Every measurement of "merit" is susceptible to bias.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Sure. The internet fits as closely as any place. After all, on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog.
Unless you out yourself.
Woof.
Re: (Score:2)
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You are all cows. Cows say moo. MOO! MOO! Moo cows MOO! Moo say the cows. YOU SELF-IDENTIFYING COWS!!
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Maybe that used to be the case back when you needed an IQ above room temperature to get online.
By now, the internet is the poster child of the way the IQ of a group of people is calculated: Take the group's biggest idiot and divide by the number of feet.
And on the internet, there's a lot of feet.
Re: Women and minorities encouraged to apply (Score:2)
As a platonic ideal it exists, and one can reasonably score real policies and practices against it.
Letting in only people who score above X on the SAT scores higher than allowing certain other people in who score lower but make the campus more aesthetically pleasing to a small number of influential people.
Having the same standard regarding whatever metric is defined as "merit" for all applicants regardless of immutable characteristics of their birth perhaps does not achieve nirvana but certainly comes close
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I for one was always of the opinion that a pure meritocracy was always a good idea
The metrics for merit always wind up being gamed.
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First huh?
*Looks in Bible.*
Sure bro.
Re: (Score:2)
That makes no sense. Let's say you have 10 people running a race the prize being chocolate ice cream. If only 3 people like chocolate ice cream, only the 3 of them are incentivized to run. If you have a simple mind like yours, you probably think switching to strawberry flavor, which the other 7 like would dis-incentivize the 3 chocolate-likers. You'd be right of course. But then what you fail to see is that there may be OTHER solutions. Check for a flavor that all 10 like more than either chocolate or straw
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Where your analogy falls flat is that the people I hire I don't hire for the sake of what they want but for the sake of what my company needs. I don't care if they like chocolate or strawberry if neither of these things is what gets me a product that I can sell.
So I offer an incentive that both of them will value equally: Money. That way they can buy chocolate or strawberry, or whatever else they like. This again means that I don't really give a fuck whether I get the chocolate or strawberry enthusiast, bec
Re: "The Beating of a Liberal" (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't decide if you're a vile person because you believe people you disagree with deserve to be beaten, or because you think so little of Marines that by default they'll just beat up any person you believe they may disagree with.
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Don't get pissy just cuz they're good at it.
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If by "removalist", you mean "garbage man", here a lot of them are union jobs with the municipality. That means good pay and good pensions.
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Couldn't have anything to do with being second class citizens until a century ago...