I don’t mean to be picking on Brad Wilcox, but I can’t resist commenting on this post. Bouncing off a Washington Post article entitled “Disappearing Act,” about the alleged decline of male college enrollment, Brad writes:
The problem is that both Brad and the Washington Post article are getting facts wrong. For instance, is average Joe falling behind average Jane economically? Sure doesn’t look like it. Here are some charts showing median earnings of Hispanic, black and white men and women at different levels of education (these charts are based on 2000 income data compiled by the Census Bureau). For literally as long as we’ve been measuring, men with less education have earned more than women with more education. So, contrary to Brad’s expectations, there’s no reason to think that women’s advantage in education is going to reverse men’s advantages economically. Second, while it’s true that women are now more likely to attend college, it’s not because men are “disappearing.” It’s because women have been increasing their rate of college attendance faster than men have been. As Robin Herman writes (hat tip: Jill at Feministe): But at the same time, in 1983 only 21 percent of American college-aged women were enrolled in college, and that number climbed more steeply to 41 percent of all college-aged women two decades later. I do think it’s legitimate to want more young men to attend college. But what’s going on is not a “crisis” of “disappearing men,” nor are men “falling behind” in any larger cultural sense. Furthermore, the state of men today is not comparable to the state of women in the 1970s (or the 1870s!), when feminists took up the issue of small numbers of women going to college. The issue for feminists was not college education alone, but the things college education could lead to: The ability of women to earn independent livings, so that women would have possibilities in life other than low-pay work or being supported by fathers and husbands. Men as a whole – even those who don’t go to college – are not in a comparable situation. But some men – mainly black men and Hispanic men – are in a comparable situation. What’s amazing to me is that neither Brad’s post, nor the Washington Post, nor this silly National Review article that Hugo takes apart, mention the word “race.” It’s not really possible to discuss this issue in any serious way without talking about race as well as class. Unfortunately, this chart (source) doesn’t account for wealth, but it does provide a look at college attendance, sex and race. (Click on the chart to view a larger version). Women (especially black and Hispanic women) have been increasing their rates of college attendance faster than men – but the gap between white men and women is relatively narrow, and it’s only among Hispanic men that the rates of attendance have actually gone down. In the comments of Feministe, Rachel of the new-to-me blog Rachels Tavern (which is so going on my blogroll!) gets to what should be the heart of the issue: So a better question is not where are the missing men, but where are the missing Black and Latino men and their poor White counterparts? The gender gap can only be understood by taking an intersectional approach. The typical suburban White guy still goes to college, but many other men do not.
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I have the chart broken down by race, class, and gender somewhere…let me look at the Chronicle of Higher Edu……Hold on just a minute
I am not a statistician by any means, but even I understand the concept of lurking variables. Throwing more resources at boys generally is unlikely to up the rate of college attendance of men, since I would venture to say that the two things that are really hindering their college participation are (1) high school dropout rates (especially true for hispanic males according to prior statistics I have seen) and (2) the cost of college. To reverse this, schools would have to make real effort to reduce drop out rates of at-risk boys, and colleges would have to take a more needs based aid approach.
I venture that there will be a natural small but significant divide between men and women for the foreseeable future because there are still a greater prevalance of well-paying careers for men that do not require a college degree – construction, building trades, and computer skills via technical certification programs. So, for instance, my sister’s stepson works at a telecom company as a Microsoft engineer while his wife, with a four year degree, works as an administrative assistant, and makes much less money.
I found it. Let’s see if this works, if not I’ll post it in my blog. This is a chart from a 2001 article in the chronicle of higher education by Andrew Boornstein. It won’t come up clearly….
I’m still figuring out the graph thing, here is a link to a very ugly graph.
I doubt the high incarceration rate of black men is helping the situation much, either.
I doubt the high incarceration rate of black men is helping the situation much, either.
Undoubtedly.
There is also the fact that one common career plan for conventionally ambitious but materially disadvantaged youth is high school -> military -> college -> professional career. While a quite viable plan, it often happens that during or after the “military” phase, a family is acquired – and that can change the track to “immediately available skilled technical job that doesn’t require college”.
That’s not a terrible career path, but it often ends up deferring or eliminating college as part of the path for some of these low-starting-wealth individuals. And of course, a fairly high proportion of black men are starting out from a position of low wealth.
It’s also the case that the military has stopped being a place where young men go to ‘shape up’–a juvenile criminal conviction, or minor drug use, or even childhood asthma can completely tank entry into the military.
Do you have any data that track the instructional technique utelized by regions who demonstrate a higher male numerical value?
Reg, want to put that in English?
Translation:
Do schools where men have a higher participation in higher ed have a difference in pedagogical technique?
In other words, are men being attracted/repelled by something the schools themselves are doing.
“Do schools where men have a higher participation in higher ed have a difference in pedagogical technique?
In other words, are men being attracted/repelled by something the schools themselves are doing.”
Excluding the handful of military academies I doubt it. It’s not like these guys go there and drop out…..they don’t even make it to college in the first place.
I think the charts about about the gender gap in earnings reveal at least part of the reason young men are not going to college…that is they do not need as much education to earn as much as their female peers. Given the lowering of financial aid, and subsequent increases in tutition I think working class men may have more trouble paying for school and because they can find reasonably paying jobs in trades they are not going on to college. However, their female counterparts don’t have as many opportunities in such jobs. I also second the points about the high incarceration rates of Black men.
For literally as long as we’ve been measuring, men with less education have earned more than women with more education.
That may be an artifact of the way you measure “education.” I majored in computer science, and most of my classes were, much to my chagrin, 80-90% male. And most of the women were Asian (not represented in your charts). In general, men tend to gravitate toward fields of study which lead to higher-paying jobs.
I would argue that degrees in different fields are not necessarily commensurable, at least insofar as their effects on income are concerned. For example, I suspect that women with bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering tend to do better than men with master’s degrees in literature.
Could the decline in college enrollment for Hispanic males be related to immigration? Also, I’m intrigued by the fact that the relationship between education and income is different for black men than it is for all other groups (e.g., only for black men is an associate degree worse than “some college”). Does anyone have a hypothesis to explain this?
Thoughts:
Perhaps black woman are, on average, smarter than black men. There is some evidence to support this.
It’s also the case that the military has stopped being a place where young men go to ‘shape up'”“a juvenile criminal conviction, or minor drug use, or even childhood asthma can completely tank entry into the military.
Another issue is that the Army has become more and more IQ-selective as soldiering has become more technical and more demanding of brain power. The Army does extensive IQ testing of potential recruits. This eliminates a lot of black men, who on average score 15 points, or one standard deviation, below the mean.* (The Army is actually disproportionately white because of this; in fact, whites are disproportionately represented (compared to their share of the U.S. population) among American fatalities in Iraq).
* Whether or not you give any credence to IQ tests and whatever you believe to be the cause of the gap, blacks do score lower on average on these tests and the Army does a lot of IQ testing.
Could the decline in college enrollment for Hispanic males be related to immigration?
Quite likely. Every non-college bound Hispanic immmigrant will depress the rate of Hispanics attending college (by increasing the denominator of the ratio), even if his o0r her presence does not actually impact college attendance among those Hispanics who are not immigrants.
I like the site, as you may guess from my several comments, but it seems to me you’re missing the point.
Do you really think they’re advocating some sort of program to push male education? They’re pointing out that if this exact data existed with roles reversed it would be considered proof of discrimination and worthy of both administrative and legislative review. Your comment that the numbers themselves mean nothing without further analysis is exactly their point.
Perhaps black woman are, on average, smarter than black men.
Damn. Didn’t the President of Harvard get pilloried for saying that it was an object of legitimate inquiry to investigate whether men might have a higher aptitude for mathematics than women? Calls for his resignation, some professor from MIT claimed she thought she was going to faint when she heard it, etc. That’s nothing compared to having a study that would make the claim that there actually IS an intellectual difference in the sexes.
What was the reaction from academia regarding this study?
If I read this correctly, it’s saying that there are now more women getting college educations than men, and that the differential is greater in minorities.
That has interesting implications. Women are much more likely to marry a man with a greater education than they have than they are to marry a man with a lower education. If more women have college educations than men do, either that’s going to change or you’re going to have a lot of college-education women who won’t be able to find what they consider suitable marriage partners, and it’s going to be worse for minorities.
Or are we already there, eh? Professional women get tired of looking for Mr. Right and end up choosing to be single mothers. Why can’t they find Mr. Right? Educational imbalances and a cultural norm that hasn’t changed to accomodate it might be one reason.
They’re pointing out that if this exact data existed with roles reversed it would be considered proof of discrimination…
With roles reversed? You mean, if there were more men than women enrolling in college, but women consistently earned more than men at all educational levels and made up a vast majority of tenured professors?
I think the statistics have a tendency to obscure certain facts.
Certainly, not all education is equal, and so as Brandon points out, gender skews within individual fields help to explain why higher participation will not necessarily translate into higher earnings.
Finally, given the earnings difference for men and women at any given educational level, you’d need vastly more women to be getting more education than men for the economic picture to equalize. So, even if men were disappearing from higher-ed, it’d take many years for income inequality between men and women to disappear, unless the gap at each educational level were narrowed.
I think it’s true that what you study in college makes a difference.
However, even peer-reviewed studies that have controlled for things like college major, work experience, time at the job, etc, have found that a substantial wage gap remains (see the citations in this post, for example).
Uh, Glaivester, did you bother to read that link you posted? Did you catch that the blog’s author asked Charles Murray to run calculations on IQ?
I think many of these boys not going to college are going into the skilled trades (still overwhelmingly male) instead. And plumbers, electricians and the like earn good salaries and benefits without needing a college degree.
Meanwhile there is no comparable track to a good job without college for women. Most women don’t go into trade jobs, and it’s no longer possible to get a well-paying “executive administrative assistant” or office manager job without college.
And if you think that these blue-collar guys aren’t marrying up to college-educated women, you haven’t read the wedding announcements in my local paper. I’ve noticed that if one person in a couple has a B.A. and the other doesn’t, it’s the woman with a B.A. and the man with no B.A. but a skilled trade job.
Meanwhile there is no comparable track to a good job without college for women.
This statement conflicts with the next one:
Most women don’t go into trade jobs,
Which means that there is a comparable track; it’s just that women are choosing not to pursue it. At least, according to you. I bet if you contact the local skill unions (carpentry, electrician, etc.), you’ll find that there is a small but increasing number of women who are getting into the trades.
And if you think that these blue-collar guys aren’t marrying up to college-educated women, you haven’t read the wedding announcements in my local paper. I’ve noticed that if one person in a couple has a B.A. and the other doesn’t, it’s the woman with a B.A. and the man with no B.A. but a skilled trade job.
What local paper is that? I won’t argue that this doesn’t happen, but I’d bet it’s a minority compared to degreed men marrying non-degreed women. Or else men with technical degrees marrying women with non-technical degrees (the job openings for which are much lower paying).
Don’t you still have to go to college to get into a skilled trade or is that just in Canada? I can’t think of a single skilled job where you don’t have at least a 2 year diploma.
Note that to me, in Canada, a college *diploma* gets you a trade or other blue-collar level job, a university *degree* is where your BA or BSc etc. comes in. Which doesn’t nessecarily get you a job (we used to joke that our Physics diplomas were going to come with a Mc Donalds application printed on the back).
Don’t you still have to go to college to get into a skilled trade or is that just in Canada?
No. Most skilled trades run on apprenticeship programs in the state. There are technical schools that teach valuable skills but if they even grant degrees, they aren’t considered academic in any way. It’s not college; it’s trade school.
(The main difference, he said cynically, being that trade schools teach you skills that increase the value of your economic product, and college teaches you attitudes that decrease it.)
Every boy I know, from smart boys on down academically, wants to go to college. Incarceration in the US has nothing to do with it – – the same situation exists in other post-industrial countries where few people are in prison.
Colleges are gender biased, just like schools are gender biased.
Grades are based on behavior, not knowledge.
Boys’ behavior is based on our neurology. We have 15% less seratonin than girls, which is why males fidget, stare out the window, have less ability to concentrate than females. Boys score just as well as girls on tests.
The problem rests with our gender-biased schools and colleges, not with the boys.
Colleges are gender biased, just like schools are gender biased.
Grades are based on behavior, not knowledge.
So, if I behaved well in school, but did not know the subject matter, I would have gotten good grades? Darn, I could have spent all that time partying instead of studying.
which is why males fidget, stare out the window, have less ability to concentrate than females. Boys score just as well as girls on tests.
So if they are scoring just as well on tests, there’s no problem, right?
Nineshift:
“Colleges are gender biased, just like schools are gender biased.
Grades are based on behavior, not knowledge.”
Can you show me some documentation that backs this statement up?
Grades are not based upon behavior alone, but behavior is a component in consideration for making good grades. After all, a child that fidgets and disrupts class is likely to be put out of class, therefore not getting the entire lesson causing poor performance on the test.
There are many problems with America’s educational system, but I don’t find that “behavior over knowledge” is one of those issues. I don’t remember my college application requesting my conduct marks from high school.
There may be neurological differences between the genders, but until I see serious scientific study I just can’t buy that boys are disadvantaged because they cannot be quiet in class or not be bullies.
As to the idea that males fidget more and have less seratonin, why would that account for
any changes in their success in the classroom—haven’t males always fidgeted more? Have they only recently lost all that seratonin? I think the idea of gender differences in the classroom has to be discounted, or there would have been this issue for as long as there have been classrooms and fidgety males!
http://www.educationsector.org/analysis/analysis_show.htm?doc_id=378705
I read the report of Sarah Mead of the Education Sector, the supposedly non-partisan think tank that calls itself a source for “sound” policy and “honest brokerage” of evidence.
I think I counted the word “hysteria” about every other page of the report. Mead really
does not present any convicing arguments why we should dismiss that something
may be going on with boys. I found her consistent focus on gender differences to be
just snowing the issue. Futhermore, the way she framed the stats was just a case of textbook
“cherry picking.” As Gurian said when he was asked to react, ” the educational stats are only
a small piece of the puzzle.” I, for one, believe something is going on with boys that crosses
racial and economic boundaries.. Social researchers such as Kindlon and Thompson, Pollack,
and others have culled data of overwhelmingly white males, with similar findings. Significantly, Mead spent barely one paragraph on her assertion that we instead should focus on the economic and racial achievement gaps. More, she said that it doesn’t serve children’s intersts to focus on the gender gap. Yet, that is what she does for all of her report, aside
from her laments about how women still don’t make …., and how women are still underrepresented…
and on, and on. As a mother of son, and three daughters, I was deeply offended by her spin
of the debate. When I checked her credentials, I found that the “expert” senior policy analyst, formerly working for PPI ( Progressive Policy Institute), largely echoing rightwing platform rhetoric, doesn’t even hold a masters degree herself, neither was ever a teacher.