The education gap between men and women

[Sundancer]

From WSJ so behind a firewall, with apologies, but here's the gist. I'm certain this will turn into a cynical joke thread but this is a terrible trend. In no way do I believe that college is the be-all end-all for the future but it definitely means something and the last quoted portion below on anti-intellectualism rings true, as men turn to Twitter and celebs like Howard Stern and Joe Rogan (sorry to invoke him twice in a day..again I'm a fan Joe!) for intellectual and moral guidance. 

 

Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels.

 

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. The divergence increases at graduation: After six years of college, 65% of women in the U.S. who started a four-year university in 2012 received diplomas by 2018 compared with 59% of men during the same period, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

 

...

Men dominate top positions in industry, finance, politics and entertainment. They also hold a majority of tenured faculty positions and run most U.S. college campuses. Yet female college students are running laps around their male counterparts.

 

The University of Vermont is typical. The school president is a man and so are nearly two-thirds of the campus trustees. Women made up about 80% of honors graduates last year in the colleges of arts and sciences.

...

Many young men are hobbled by a lack of guidance, a strain of anti-intellectualism and a growing belief that college degrees don’t pay off, said Ed Grocholski, a senior vice president at Junior Achievement USA, which works with about five million students every year to teach about career paths, financial literacy and entrepreneurship.

 

“What I see is there is a kind of hope deficit,” Mr. Grocholski said.

Edited September 14, 2021 by Sundancer

[Demongyz]

Who wants to go to college to be told you are the devil? 

Who wants to pay more for that honor? 

Why spend years in college learning that crap only to find that your degree is useless and you are up to your eyeballs in debt?

 

Who needs a study to tell them the answers to these questions?

 

[Sundancer]

3 minutes ago, Demongyz said:

Who wants to go to college to be told you are the devil? 

Who wants to pay more for that honor? 

Why spend years in college learning that crap only to find that your degree is useless and you are up to your eyeballs in debt?

 

Who needs a study to tell them the answers to these questions?

 

 

For the few young men going into the service or a trade, I agree to some extent. But the current batch is playing video games in their rooms of the parents' home and a college degree remains a path to the middle class. 

Edited September 14, 2021 by Sundancer

[The Frankish Reich]

Interesting topic - thanks for posting, Sundancer.

I saw this in the WSJ, and as the dad of a recent HS grad - a girl - it kind of fits what I've been observing. The highest achievers tend to be a pretty equal mix of boys and girls. But the tier below that is clearly composed of a majority of girls, and that becomes even more evident when we go down another tier. The stereotype is that girls are obsessed with social media, boys with video games, and they are equally distracted from school work but by different things. From what I've seen, this just isn't true. The video game obsessions completely dominate the life of boys to the detriment of anything else, whereas the girls somehow manage to integrate all that social media obsessiveness into planning their social media obsessed college futures. 

[The Frankish Reich]

1 minute ago, Sundancer said:

 

For the few young men going into the service or a trade, I agree to some exttnt. But the current batch is playing video games in their rooms of the parents' home and a college degree remains a path to the middle class. 

Bingo.

If you read the full article, you'll see that some of the examples are exactly this - boys who were decent (not stellar) students who are just too damn lazy to get anything going. We're not talking here about the kid who struggles in school but is great at something mechanical - those boys quickly find their place in one of the good trades. And they have no qualms about giving up and moving back home. This would have been unthinkable for most of the guys I knew in HS ... you moved out, you didn't move back. It was social death. What, like, I'm gonna try to bring a girl back to my mom's house? That's why we moved out!

 

One example from the article:

 

Jack Bartholomew, 19, started his freshman year at Bowling Green State University during the pandemic, taking his classes online. During the first weeks, he said, he was confused by the course material and grew frustrated. Finally, he quit. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said. “I just feel lost.”

Mr. Bartholomew’s parents and one older sister have college degrees. He was a solid student in high school and was interested in studying graphic design. Yet while working online from his second-floor bedroom, his introductory courses seemed pointless for how much he was paying, he said.

He works 40 hours a week, at $15.50 an hour, packing boxes at an Amazon warehouse not far from his house in Perrysburg, Ohio. It isn’t a long-term job, Mr. Bartholomew said, and he doesn’t know what to do next.

[Governor]

56 minutes ago, Sundancer said:

 

For the few young men going into the service or a trade, I agree to some extent. But the current batch is playing video games in their rooms of the parents' home and a college degree remains a path to the middle class. 

There hasn’t been a middle class since the 80’s. 
 

You mean poverty. Middle-class is now a household income of at least 125k/year. Anyone coming in less than that is lower middle-class regardless of state lived.

 

And that isn’t just because of inflation either. There’s been decades of union-busting and “right to work” that eliminated the once healthy middle-class.

 

Its been a race to the bottom since 1990 or so.

 

Women of course took that on the chin until recently where businesses started hiring more women at a cheaper rate, which then led to Trumpism and white male grievance.

Edited September 14, 2021 by Governor

[Demongyz]

33 minutes ago, Governor said:

There hasn’t been a middle class since the 80’s. 
 

You mean poverty. Middle-class is now a household income of at least 125k/year. Anyone coming in less than that is lower middle-class regardless of state lived.

 

And that isn’t just because of inflation either. There’s been decades of union-busting and “right to work” that eliminated the once healthy middle-class.

 

Its been a race to the bottom since 1990 or so.

 

Women of course took that on the chin until recently where businesses started hiring more women at a cheaper rate, which then led to Trumpism and white male grievance.

NAFTA was a huge part of this as well.

 

Also, all through school they beat it into your head if you don't go to the University you are trash, not everyone can do that.  They gutted wood shop, auto shop, etc and wonder why everyone sits at home and games.

 

[Sundancer]

26 minutes ago, Governor said:

There hasn’t been a middle class since the 80’s. 
 

You mean poverty. Middle-class is now a household income of at least 125k/year. Anyone coming in less than that is lower middle-class regardless of state lived.

 

And that isn’t just because of inflation either. There’s been decades of union-busting and “right to work” that eliminated the once healthy middle-class.

 

Its been a race to the bottom since 1990 or so.

 

There's no poverty in America by measures of the word as you might use it. We have elevated everyone. The only people who truly still don't have a meal in front of themselves every day of the week are mentally ill or not asking for help in the right place (and such people 100% exist). Our unemployed have unlimited data plans, Venmo accounts as well as access to emergency rooms, air conditioned sleeping, and heat. 

 

I am not saying that the lowest 20% in America have it easy, but easy is relative to time in the US and place in the world. The wealth gap is a fact, not a problem. People who whine about it are just envious, not grateful.  

 

Just now, Demongyz said:

NAFTA was a huge part of this as well.

 

Also, all through school they beat it into your head if you don't go to the University you are trash, not everyone can do that.  They gutted wood shop, auto shop, etc and wonder why everyone sits at home and games.

 

 

Free trade is always a net positive. NAFTA was assuredly so. You're living in a 40s paradigm if you think Americans will fill blue collar factory jobs in 2021. 

[Demongyz]

2 minutes ago, Sundancer said:

 

There's no poverty in America by measures of the word as you might use it. We have elevated everyone. The only people who truly still don't have a meal in front of themselves every day of the week are mentally ill or not asking for help in the right place (and such people 100% exist). Our unemployed have unlimited data plans, Venmo accounts as well as access to emergency rooms, air conditioned sleeping, and heat. 

 

I am not saying that the lowest 20% in America have it easy, but easy is relative to time in the US and place in the world. The wealth gap is a fact, not a problem. People who whine about it are just envious, not grateful.  

 

 

Free trade is always a net positive. NAFTA was assuredly so. You're living in a 40s paradigm if you think Americans will fill blue collar factory jobs in 2021. 

Free trade is great!  Free trade for them and not for US sucks.

 

Try to send milk to Canada.

[Sundancer]

3 minutes ago, Demongyz said:

Free trade is great!  Free trade for them and not for US sucks.

 

Try to send milk to Canada.

 

NAFTA is not perfect but it made things better on the average for everyone. People want to ***** on free trade but it's not likely to ever be totally free. Be happy it mostly is. 

[The Frankish Reich]

28 minutes ago, Governor said:

There hasn’t been a middle class since the 80’s. 
 

You mean poverty. Middle-class is now a household income of at least 125k/year. Anyone coming in less than that is lower middle-class regardless of state lived.

 

And that isn’t just because of inflation either. There’s been decades of union-busting and “right to work” that eliminated the once healthy middle-class.

 

Its been a race to the bottom since 1990 or so.

No, I'm not all gloom and doom here.

Think about the story of the kid I quoted above - the one who dropped out of Bowling Green Univ. to work at Amazon - is a good example.

Let's say he set his sights on being a school teacher. An honorable profession, and one that gets you 2.5 months off every summer. 

The average salary of a teacher in Bowling Green is $54,000.

Or lets say he keeps his Amazon job instead, making $15.50/hr full time (about $32,000 a year), and then marries a teacher. That's a household income of $86,000, probably a little lower until the teacher gets established. Let's call it $80,000.

The median price of a home in Bowling Green is about $200,000. Kid is living at home; I hope he's saving for a down payment (yeah, right). The mortgage on a $200,000 home, assuming they let him put 10K down with a higher interest rate is about $850/month (principal and interest).

Sure there's taxes, but then they have a kid and get the Biden extra monthly $300 to defray that cost.

The average family living in Bowling Green is doing perfectly fine! But you know what? You gotta work to get that job. You gotta finish college to get that teaching job. You can't be concentrating on "making music" and "investing in cryptocurrencies" like one of the kids in the article. Study. A little; you don't need to study a lot to get a degree with grade inflation as it is. The middle class lifestyle is right there waiting for you. Student loans? Well, yeah, a bit of a burden at the start, but we'll get you on a payment plan that maxes out at 10% of your income with full loan forgiveness because you're a teacher after 10 years. 

Take this from an old school boomer who didn't pay his student loans off until he was 53 - life ain't so bad today. I'm sorry college and work are just too damn boring for the kids in the WSJ article. At least mom hasn't kicked your butt out ... yet.

[Governor]

11 minutes ago, Sundancer said:

 

There's no poverty in America by measures of the word as you might use it. We have elevated everyone. The only people who truly still don't have a meal in front of themselves every day of the week are mentally ill or not asking for help in the right place (and such people 100% exist). Our unemployed have unlimited data plans, Venmo accounts as well as access to emergency rooms, air conditioned sleeping, and heat. 

 

I am not saying that the lowest 20% in America have it easy, but easy is relative to time in the US and place in the world. The wealth gap is a fact, not a problem. People who whine about it are just envious, not grateful.  

 

 

Free trade is always a net positive. NAFTA was assuredly so. You're living in a 40s paradigm if you think Americans will fill blue collar factory jobs in 2021. 

Yeah, you’re right. I wasn’t finished with the timeline yet. Around 2000……

 

I’ll circle back to you main topic momentarily.

[Governor]

16 minutes ago, The Frankish Reich said:

No, I'm not all gloom and doom here.

Think about the story of the kid I quoted above - the one who dropped out of Bowling Green Univ. to work at Amazon - is a good example.

Let's say he set his sights on being a school teacher. An honorable profession, and one that gets you 2.5 months off every summer. 

The average salary of a teacher in Bowling Green is $54,000.

Or lets say he keeps his Amazon job instead, making $15.50/hr full time (about $32,000 a year), and then marries a teacher. That's a household income of $86,000, probably a little lower until the teacher gets established. Let's call it $80,000.

The median price of a home in Bowling Green is about $200,000. Kid is living at home; I hope he's saving for a down payment (yeah, right). The mortgage on a $200,000 home, assuming they let him put 10K down with a higher interest rate is about $850/month (principal and interest).

Sure there's taxes, but then they have a kid and get the Biden extra monthly $300 to defray that cost.

The average family living in Bowling Green is doing perfectly fine! But you know what? You gotta work to get that job. You gotta finish college to get that teaching job. You can't be concentrating on "making music" and "investing in cryptocurrencies" like one of the kids in the article. Study. A little; you don't need to study a lot to get a degree with grade inflation as it is. The middle class lifestyle is right there waiting for you. Student loans? Well, yeah, a bit of a burden at the start, but we'll get you on a payment plan that maxes out at 10% of your income with full loan forgiveness because you're a teacher after 10 years. 

Take this from an old school boomer who didn't pay his student loans off until he was 53 - life ain't so bad today. I'm sorry college and work are just too damn boring for the kids in the WSJ article. At least mom hasn't kicked your butt out ... yet.

Yeah, I get all of that, but as a boomer, you’re missing what really happened, which has led to the feeling of dread that I think you mentioned earlier.

 

Around 2000…..(lol) W let a bunch of private schools prey on our military and most desperate. These folks were promised the world and took out high interest private loans to attend schools that are now out of business or lost accreditation along the way.

 

These are the loans being forgiven by Biden as we speak. These fly-by-night colleges all disappeared. Those degrees are worth less than an OJ Simpson rookie card.

 

It gets worse than that.

 

State universities started offering degrees in totally ridiculous fields like social media marketing, fashion design, animation, etc. and a whole host of others.

 

Its no wonder kids don’t want to attend college. It’s been a total scam for 20 years. I have no issues with people going back to trades. It’s recession proof.

Edited September 14, 2021 by Governor

[The Frankish Reich]

17 minutes ago, Governor said:

Yeah, I get all of that, but as a boomer, you’re missing what really happened, which has led to the feeling of dread that I think you mentioned earlier.

 

Around 2000…..(lol) W let a bunch of private schools prey on our military and most desperate. These folks were promised the world and took out high interest private loans to attend schools that are now out of business or lost accreditation along the way.

 

These are the loans being forgiven by Biden as we speak. These fly-by-night colleges all disappeared. Those degrees are worth less than an OJ Simpson rookie card.

 

It gets worse than that.

 

State universities started offering degrees in totally ridiculous fields like “social media marketing” and a whole host of others.

 

Its no wonder kids don’t want to attend college. It’s been a total scam for 20 years. I have no issues with people going back to trades. It’s recession proof.

Well, I agree with you here. Some of for-profit colleges were literally criminal, and they put their students in a financial hole for years, if not permanently.

What we need is a little truth telling and tough love for our high school and college students.

Choose a career track where there's a need. Stop telling kids to follow their passion. There are some remarkably talented world class athletes and ballerinas out there that can make a living at those things. They are the .001 percent. Get a degree. Work toward being a nurse, or a teacher, or someone who knows medical billing (I know a kid who does that, and his career is off to a fine start). If you're better with your hands than you are with tests, learn a trade. We can't outsource plumbing and wiring to China or India (although we do seem pretty good at bringing in people to America to do those kinds of things). Don't waste time and money - finish a degree in four years. Don't have a family until you can afford it. Live at home if you have to to save money for a down payment (I also know a kid who did that and surprised everyone by buying a house, with his own money, at 28).

I just looked up my childhood home in Amherst. Someone bought it for $150,000 in 2019. Zillow says it's worth $200,000 now. There is absolutely nothing "out of reach" about that house for, say, a teacher married to a firefighter, or a nurse married to a UPS driver. That would be exactly the same standard of living as I had growing up. (EDIT: in reality, a whole lot better than what I had - I looked at the Zillow pictures and it's been remodeled to look like one of those HGTV projects; it has a nice deck that wasn't there before; nice sleek appliances that we never had; flat screen TVs ... the standard of living is a lot, lot better in many ways although the physical structure looks much the same from the street). It's not that that "middle class dream" is gone; it's often that kids today find the standard of living that I had to fall short of what they think they deserve. They think they deserve the McMansion, and not when they're 50; they want it when they're in their 20s. I couldn't have it in my 20s either.

Edited September 14, 2021 by The Frankish Reich

[Governor]

2 minutes ago, The Frankish Reich said:

Well, I agree with you here. Some of for-profit colleges were literally criminal, and they put their students in a financial hole for years, if not permanently.

What we need is a little truth telling and tough love for our high school and college students.

Choose a career track where there's a need. Stop telling kids to follow their passion. There are some remarkably talented world class athletes and ballerinas out there that can make a living at those things. They are the .001 percent. Get a degree. Work toward being a nurse, or a teacher, or someone who knows medical billing (I know a kid who does that, and his career is off to a fine start). If you're better with your hands than you are with tests, learn a trade. We can't outsource plumbing and wiring to China or India (although we do seem pretty good at bringing in people to America to do those kinds of things). Don't waste time and money - finish a degree in four years. Don't have a family until you can afford it. Live at home if you have to to save money for a down payment (I also know a kid who did that and surprised everyone by buying a house, with his own money, at 28).

I just looked up my childhood home in Amherst. Someone bought it for $150,000 in 2019. Zillow says it's worth $200,000 now. There is absolutely nothing "out of reach" about that house for, say, a teacher married to a firefighter, or a nurse married to a UPS driver. That would be exactly the same standard of living as I had growing up. It's not that that "middle class dream" is gone; it's often that kids today find the standard of living that I had to fall short of what they think they deserve. They think they deserve the McMansion, and not when they're 50; they want it when they're in their 20s. I couldn't have it in my 20s either.

People view all of these material items as “necessities” now.

 

I didn’t have a 400/month car payment, 125/month phone bill, streaming services, Xbox, etc.

 

I either found a pay phone and called my mom, or I was walking my ass home.

 

Somehow, consumerism tricked everyone into thinking they “need” these things. 

[unbillievable]

THe future is female!

 

Women will exceed Men in salary and will struggle to find a worthy partner; those few who make more than them and are educated. The Men will live with their parents while the ladies will grow old with cats.

 

Dating sites have proved that 80% of women only deem 20% of Men acceptable to date.

 

Once the Japanese perfect sex robots, the human race will go extinct.

[The Frankish Reich]

Sometimes I think the problem is that boomers are living too long. We keep hearing about generational wealth - boomers hoarding all of it with millennials and Gen Z left with the scraps we discard. Where do those millenials and Gen Z'ers think that wealth is going when we kick the bucket? The tax man, sure, but whatever's left goes straight to you ...

[unbillievable]

1 hour ago, Demongyz said:

Who wants to go to college to be told you are the devil? 

Who wants to pay more for that honor? 

Why spend years in college learning that crap only to find that your degree is useless and you are up to your eyeballs in debt?

 

Who needs a study to tell them the answers to these questions?

 

 

We've spent decades promoting the idea that college is no longer just to get a job, but to teach a person HOW to think, a role that used to be done by parents.

 

 

1 minute ago, The Frankish Reich said:

Sometimes I think the problem is that boomers are living too long. We keep hearing about generational wealth - boomers hoarding all of it with millennials and Gen Z left with the scraps we discard. Where do those millenials and Gen Z'ers think that wealth is going when we kick the bucket? The tax man, sure, but whatever's left goes straight to you ...

That's why Covid was engineered. It solves the old people problem; just in time to save Social Security.

[The Frankish Reich]

3 minutes ago, unbillievable said:

THe future is female!

 

Women will exceed Men in salary and will struggle to find a worthy partner; those few who make more than them and are educated. The Men will live with their parents while the ladies will grow old with cats.

 

Dating sites have proved that 80% of women only deem 20% of Men acceptable to date.

 

Once the Japanese perfect sex robots, the human race will go extinct.

Thank goodness exclusively gay males outnumber exclusively lesbian women by about 4:1!

3 minutes ago, unbillievable said:

That's why Covid was engineered. It solves the old people problem; just in time to save Social Security.

Ahh, I see. Did "they" engineer anti-vaxxers too to selectively weed out the Texas-to-Florida population?

[Over 29 years of fanhood]

The federal student loan Ponzi scheme has allowed theses institutions to pillage and steal from unwitting college kids to commit to hundreds of thousands of dollars of loans they can’t pay. 

 

just like all the shameful institutions that scam kids into paying for said higher learning without giving them any marketable skills. 

 

it’s another place where Asia destroys us, they take all stems spots and then earn access to our high paying jobs, while art majors work at Best Buy. 
 

Talk about another government subsidized and completely corrupt system. 

 

Nobody learns to be more moral at college. 

 

 

Edited September 14, 2021 by Over 29 years of fanhood