This year, the freshman class at many universities could have been called the fresh woman class. Among those enrolling at my university this year, the percentage of females jumped to 70. Since we don’t yet have an “undecided” category for gender that means the percentage of males fell to 30. While many are asking why so many women are going to college it might make more sense to ask why so few men are going to college.As you may recall, I was the first to point out that the changing university demographics would preclude many educated women from marrying their educational peers. Now we know it will preclude MOST educated women from doing so.
There are some fairly obvious reasons for the demographic shift. While claiming to be combatting a hostile environment for women, the feminist movement has actually been creating a hostile campus environment for men for years. In fact, most of their policy initiatives are now hurting men rather than helping women. Title IX provides the most obvious example.
I have no doubt that most of the initial supporters of Title IX envisioned that it would do nothing more than bring female athletes to campus. However, it is now serving as a death sentence for many men’s athletic programs. Furthermore, as anyone following the news in the last couple of years knows, Title IX has been used to do a lot more than shift the balance of power in the arena of sports and recreation.
Unfortunately, Title IX is now used as a weapon to undermine due process for men accused of rape and sexual harassment. Over the last several years, under the expanding requirements of Title IX, universities have been pressured to use a preponderance of evidence standard rather than a standard of proof beyond a reasonable doubt in campus rape tribunals.
But here is an interesting thought. How long do you think corporations, particularly those started by men who didn't bother to get college degrees, will continue to prefer hiring people with them? I mean, I don't even look at whether a programmer has a degree or not, I look at what languages he knows and what his previous projects were.
There is neither an excuse nor a reason for not having previous projects either; the good ones have been programming seriously since they were in their early teens and they are more than happy to show them to you. It's only the college kids with degrees who haven't done anything at all.
It will be amusing when the new evidence of societal sexism cited is the number of young women in heavy debt with useless degrees.
32 comments:
For a woman, the one thing worse than not having any credentials is having society fail to recognize the value of her particular credentials. Let the crying and finger-pointing commence
"Wow, check out the set of credentials on that chick!"...said no man ever.
Educated women will turn to nerds, gammas, and foreigners for marriage.
My firm just signed up for a new compliance program. We're doing the sexual harassment portion now. It's such BS.
There's so much cultural inertia behind the "you need a degree to get ahead in life" belief. I thought it had peaked in the late 80s, when I looked around and saw that almost none of my friends who got degrees were actually using them, and the most successful were entrepreneurs of various sorts who skipped or bailed out of college. But here we are 30 years later, even after massive tuition inflation, and that belief is still going strong. I suppose that's because everyone who gets a degree has a strong vested interest in believing it and teaching it to the next generation.
It has to burn out eventually, I guess, but I've given up predicting when.
I have noticed a trend in my new employment field.
Those who are most accomplished, who have achieved a lot through hard work and actually performing things of value, have a certain type of email signature.
For example, the head physicians, the ones in charge of hundreds and thousands of other physicians, surgeons, etc., have the most simple of private email signatures (the ones automatically appended to each reply email). In a few cases, I have been surprised to discover that someone I've been working with on a project for weeks is the Director of this, or the Vice President of that.....
Then there are those who have amassed a truckload of degrees and certifications. Both their public and private email signatures are careful to list every single one of them, often times the acronymns stretch longer than their entire name. But they never seem to actually accomplish anything of strategic value, but boy are they sure busy, busy, busy doing "stuff". They are on this committee, and that commission, and part of this and that project.
And yes, most of those in the latter camp are women. Okay, so far all of them have been women, but I'm sure I'll meet a man in that category sooner or later.
Feminists will push through student loan debt forgiveness. Indeed, it has already begun.
Twenty-five years ago, when I last was in college, the bias against males already was overwhelming. From scholarships to campus jobs, from course curricula to the campus newspaper to classroom etiquette. Feminism was fully in control at all levels, student and admin, even back then.
Now it's even worse, with their Rape Culture hatefest, a mere cover of lies for seething malevolence, privilege, and gender supremacism. All of Daddy's Widdle Pwincesses must have their bogus degrees, and Somebody Else's Son . . . eh who cares, he's probably just another perpetrating, harassing, privileged Male Thing anyway. We don't want him on Our Campus, and certainly not in Our Workforce either. Males have had educations for far too long already, and only used them to exploit and rape poor oppressed WomenandGirls. So now we are Restoring Balance and Equality to our schools and cultures! HOORAY for FABULOUS US! While the nation dies. And the students duck shotgun blasts.
Well-done America! Well-done you hard-charging females, and double well-done to your punk parents and skank culture, who threw the nation (and its sons) under the bus so they could buy more Useless Stuff and Play Pretend that their princess is a genius. An employable and productive genius.
Given sufficient time and money, the United Sisterhood would drive ALL males from campus . . . except Campus Security, of course! After which the schools, and government, and media would blame men and boys for not 'taking responsibility' and attending their ideological hate-zones.
I read several years ago that the need for a degree was used to filter out people, something they could not due otherwise. VD may not be bound by EEOC stuff, but most US companies are to one point or another. Claiming to require a degree, or even now an advanced degree, may help achieve that purpose regardless of other points.
I would still recommend anyone earn a degree, but I would suggest they do so as cheaply as possible and try to complement a useful marketable skill they enjoy working in.
I still use my CS degree, though I am no longer working directly on writing code. (Information Security is not that far off however.) I am glad I did not stay with my original Aero-Astro engineering degree however, though that would certainly have prepared me for a wide range of jobs as well. That is not the normal field of most going to college however.
Move away from brick and mortar schools for degrees.
I wonder what the sex ratio for enrollment is in online universities, where you can't be put in front of a star chamber for badthink.
Coming from the Software Engineering side of things, they've dumbed the material in classes down to an extraordinary level in order to accommodate idiots.
I am probably not college material of yore, but I am getting straight A's in classes which, by all rights, I should be failing.
"Everyone gets an A!"
Instead of weeding people out, there are shuttling people through en masse in the hopes of getting more "women in 'tech," but despite how easy they have made these classes, they STILL rely on beta orbiters to do all of their work for them.
I would go so far as to say that it is a liability for a company to hire anyone with a CS degree at this stage of the game.
Brad makes a good point about degrees being part of the filtering process. I believe that this was once a truism. Anymore an advanced degree can be had for the price of admission and simply going through the process. The MBA was once a solid indicator of business knowledge. It's not any more. Anyone and everyone can get an MBA today. They are available with absolutely no undergraduate exposure to any business subjects at all.
About 10 years ago Stanford was offering an advanced certificate in finance via the internet. The cost was $3,000 and about 9 months worth of course work. All you had to do was have a undergraduate degree in a business subject and pay your tuition to qualify to take the courses. Ivy league credentials for K-Mart prices. What a deal you don't even have to leave home to get it.
I've got my sheep skins, but I'm not going to push my kids into getting theirs. Anyone who can't do the cost benefit analysis on college verses its rate of return isn't worth their MBA.
Many "hard" STEM fields still require a BS degree. I don't like STEM, as it is too broad in today's "let us party for 4 years world", but for the engineering courses (Mech E, electrical, etc.) as well as those few hard sciences (Chemistry and associated fields, physics and those associated with it), still need the logical mindset and skills that come from 4 years of hard work. (I mean that if you don't need at least 5 semesters of calculus to understand your senior year courses, they aren't worth taking fields) In the good schools, the hard majors are still hard and competitive. I assume that the companies looking to hire and train a chemical engineer or the like still want someone who can rapidly learn that company's specialized knowledge, and thus they find a way to hire the right person who worked in their 4 years at college and didn't just party.
I don't know enough about the gaming and social media fields except to say much about whether or not programmers need degrees except that the creative side seems to dominate more than elegant coding or algorithms and I don't think that those creative skills come from a college education. But with the computing services side and that side of programing that is part of larger physical projects (i.e. coding the engines/jet turbine/flight controls, etc) there seems to be need for design and coding that can be taught outside of a 4 year degree Some companies use programmers without degree, some only hire those that have them. If someone want to compare GE versus IBM versus HP on their programming hire credentials and the results, go ahead. I don't know that anyone has enough data to pull out anything critical about productivity or results from the differing hiring practices as other differences in corporate culture may well dominate over hiring credentials required.
Mainly a waste if you ask me, for the most part the college grads I know were smart people turned into drone illiterates, decent at their little slice of life but blinkered beyond the propaganda they were first exposed to at college.
@Res Ipsa
I'm in the same boat. I'm not encouraging my children to go to college, but I've mapped out what I'm going to expose them to in their teenage years. That means I'm learning stuff like 3d printing, making, and electronics as a hobby to develop their interests. That also means not having an xbox/PS4/television in the house to fry their young brains with.
These women have worthless degrees, that are basically "I was there degrees" - the comparable to the "I was there trophies" in sports women have forced upon all the kids leagues. And they think that somehow these sorry excuses for a degree makes them comparable to a man with a real degree - and somehow to high for non-degreed males.
This is the same b.s. as the women "earning" the Ranger tabs.
Now we know it will preclude MOST educated women from doing so.
Interesting observation... I wonder if there is a behavioral tipping point there.
"Daddy's Widdle Pwincesses"
(Much) smaller family sizes (compared with the historic norm) means that the burden of carrying on/improving the family reputation/providing for the parents, etc.. much more often falls on female shoulders (traditionally the role of the eldest/most capable son, with the daughters married off and other sons going into the professions/support roles*).
So it's not just dykes and those with a vested interest in the system who keep pushing women into college/careers, but also the very influential men who who otherwise be getting things steered in a better direction.
* - the lack of these from capable families contributes to the decline of institutions such as the church, government, and schools. The "Left" is often just filling a vacuum left by these missing sons, although once in charge they do a good job keeping out the few still left.
I'm seeing sexism in high gear at my work where they have flown in female managers from the other side of the world to fill positions people (men) locally are applying for.
They're bending over backwards to reduce workloads on poor female engineers whilst telling the rest of us to work harder.
A female engineer just left for an easier company and must have taken a 30% pay cut in the process, but clearly there's that gender pay gap at work.
She was promoted above her capabilities (she was less experienced than me, yet got a hefty pay rise for the job) but decided she didn't want the job. They never asked me if I wanted the job because apparently I'm not experienced enough. Go figure.
I know a round of cutbacks is coming, which we know which gender will be untouched, my only hope is that I get kept as I have a family to support.
Of course the attitudes here (in Oz) is very much "you can always FIFO" even if you've got a family.
I had a chance to attend a charity luncheon today. Did so mostly as a "show the flag" operation. As is often the case when these organizations want to shake a few more donations out of the crowd, they presented a "success story" of a couple of kids who's "family" (the two of them and their mother - no mention was ever made of a father, other than the unstated implication the mother had to flee his abuse) was helped by the organization.
The two sisters got up on stage to read a speech about how things had turned around for them, going from being homeless to moving into an apartment of their own. The oldest said she's now in college studying Photography.
Fuck.
It should be a capital offense to take money from poor people in exchange for a worthless degree.
But here is an interesting thought. How long do you think corporations, particularly those started by men who didn't bother to get college degrees, will continue to prefer hiring people with them?
And ultimately, the decline of the MRS degree will be solved via the same mechanism. Women, like corporations, will stop considering college degrees markers of success for men. They'll both go back to looking at money and power and respect from other men.
Interestingly, I just spent some time with one of my oldest friends who did electronic maintenance in the army and afterwards designed PCBs. For the past 12 years he's been driving a cab in San Diego and loving it.
Since since uber, et al., came to town, however, they have destroyed his ability to make a living wage as a cab driver (most uber drivers drive part-time, for drug and beer money (more true than not) and with a zero barrier to entry there are too many cars on the road now. Yay free market - I mean it. I think it's great!). So he decided to get back into PCB design.
He spent the last six months updating his skills 100% online. In just the past month he contacted a recruiting agency and began setting up interviews. The other day while I was visiting him, from just his second interview, he was offered a job for $32/hr! After he passes his first certification in February he will get a significant bump in pay and when he passes his second certification in October his salary should move into the low six figures.
He is 54 and has been out of the field for 12 years and has NO college degree!
Yet he was able to bring himself back up to speed in less than 6 months using just the internet. His employers didn't even care that his only formal training was in the army - 30 years ago!
The "Ivy League"?
Burn 'em all down! They are true relics of the past. They need to go the way of newspapers, magazines and books. Souvenirs that bring nothing to the experience of reading.
Just tonight, my co-worker said to the hot young female supervisor, "I just took sexual harassment training at the halfway house. I think I'm gonna be reeeaaal good at it." She ate it up. Working at a shitty factory is like working in the '80s again, I highly recommend it if you can afford a lower wage.
There are already masses of females with useless degrees who are heavily in dept. But there are less and less men who are stupid enough to will accept those women as wifes and who should pay for them and there dept.
From http://freedompowerandwealth.com
I recently read a factory owner describing how the HS gread guys working on the floor made more money than the college grads working in the office. BUT the women wanted to date the college grads! We've moved into an aristocracy based on education. Back in the early seventies, I read about a social science survey. Then income increased your status and education decreased it seperately (but the increased average income with education more than compensated for the decrease in status due to education). [Thus if two guys had the same income, the one with the least education had higher status, let alone if the less educated had a higher income, however, the college grad usually earned enough more that he had higher status.]
Speaking from the other side, what I'm seeing is an extreme demand for compsci majors. Getting a job is a chore for a statistics major, but I think a dog could get a job if it had its name on a compsci degree.
Not saying it makes sense. Very little that people do makes sense to me.
I'm not sure the Mrs degree is really a thing any more regardless of the sex ratio. Women who don't plan on getting married until their late '20s (or "sometime later") aren't looking for a husband in college.
@Eric:
Few may be looking for an MRS degree in the classical sense, but college girls still want boyfriends; and when they do eventually get married, they're reluctant to "marry down" in educational level. The full impact might not be felt for another decade, but it's predictable, and there will also be an immediate impact on campus social life.
Title IX provides the most obvious example.
Uh huh. That's the reason colleges have and promote women's basketball so much. Not because it's meaningful to anyone other than the players, their friends and families, but because they have to in order to have the (profitable) men's b-ball teams.
How much do you want to bet, say, Ohio State has a women's badminton team just so the feds/NCAA will leave the football team alone (until, of course the inevitable sanctions on it due to what it takes to be a regular 'top 25' team).
Will the wonders of affirmative action never cease?
The more conspiracy minded would suggest that women are pushed into going to school because then they feel superior to most men and thus never settle down and have children while less empowered women from the developing world continue to have large amounts of children.
The more conspiracy minded would suggest that women are pushed into going to school because then they feel superior to most men and thus never settle down and have children while less empowered women from the developing world continue to have large amounts of children.
Derrick, of course it's true that there is not a single progressive policy that would encourage fecund marriage, let alone sustain biologically intact families, let alone promote the natives' birthrate -- but I'm sure that's all just a coincidence. ;)
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