The End of Men and the Rise of Women (21 page)

Women earn almost 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees—the minimum requirement, in most cases, for an affluent life. Between 1970 and 2008, the percentage of white men ages twenty-five to thirty-four getting college degrees rose only modestly, from 20 percent in 1970 to 26 percent in 2008. Among white women in the same age range, the rate tripled, from 12 to 34 percent. This means that every year tens of thousands more women than men graduate from
college. In engineering and science, which taken together are the most common fields of study, women are beginning to crowd out men. Among college graduates sixty-five and over, women make up only 23 percent of those with degrees in science and engineering; among those twenty-five to thirty-nine years old, 45.9 percent are women. “One would think that if men were acting in a rational way, they would be getting the education they need to get along out there,” says Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. “But they are just failing to adapt.”

The pattern is moving up into advanced degrees as well. Women now earn 60 percent of master’s degrees, about half of all law and medical degrees, and about 44 percent of all business degrees. In 2009, for the first time women earned more PhDs than men, and the rate was starting to accelerate even in male-dominated fields such as math and computer science.

The education gap is widening not just in the United States, but all over the world. Each year the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development publishes data on college graduation rates in thirty-four industrial democracies. In twenty-seven of those countries, women have more college degrees than men. Norway has the largest difference, at about 18 percent. Australia and most of the European countries hover at about 10 percent. In all of these countries, a college degree is just as important as it is in the United States for getting ahead.

The same is true in less prosperous countries as well, according to a UNESCO report. In Latin America, the Caribbean, Central Asia, and the Arab States—nearly everywhere except Africa—women outnumber men in college. In some surprising countries—Bahrain,
Qatar, and Guyana, for example—women make up nearly 70 percent of college graduates. And in several countries women outnumber men in the sciences as well as in the humanities. In Saudi Arabia, for example, women’s schooling at all levels was strictly controlled by the Department of Religious Guidance until 2002, when it was moved into the Ministry of Education. By 2006, a host of women’s colleges and foreign universities open to Saudi women were established. Now women in Saudi Arabia make up more than half of undergraduates and PhDs.

A college degree is of course not a woman’s ticket straight to the top. But the sudden existence of so many well-educated, well-qualified women itching to enter the workforce puts tremendous pressure on the ruling classes. In Asian countries, women who have gone through years of grueling exams and earned top spots at local and foreign universities are no longer content to aim for middle management. In Brazil, 80 percent of college-educated women say they aspire to “top jobs,” and nearly 60 percent describe themselves as “very ambitious”—a far higher percentage than in the United States. Nearly a third of Brazilian women now make more money than their husbands.

In Islamic countries, this new cadre of educated women finds so few opportunities after earning degrees that they channel their frustration into protest. Middle East experts suspect that such women have helped to fuel the Arab Spring. In many conservative countries women are delaying marriage, because they are no longer content to shelve their degrees and revert to the old, traditional roles. Among economists, a consensus is forming that unless these developing economies begin to take advantage of the talents and training of all their citizens, their progress will stall.

I
N THE MERITOCRATIC
United States, college has always been linked to upward mobility and open horizons. Beginning around the 1920s, as many women as men went to college, although most of the women went to teacher’s colleges, as the economists Claudia Goldin, Lawrence F. Katz, and Ilyana Kuziemko point out in a 2006 article “The Homecoming of American College Women.” In the 1930s, men began pouring into colleges to hide out from the Great Depression. The pattern continued through the next couple of decades, with men gravitating to college in order to take advantage of the G.I. Bill, and later to escape the Vietnam War. By the early 1960s, three men took home a degree for every two women who did so.

College became the place where the men and women of the American elite, and increasingly of the middle class, began to define their roles. Men would stock the rising managerial and professional class, while educated women would uphold American values at home. As Adlai Stevenson told a Smith graduating class of 1955, a housewife’s task was to keep a man “truly purposeful, to keep him whole.” If the Cold War was a showdown of minds, then “we will defeat totalitarian, authoritarian ideas only by better ideas.” An educated wife could accomplish nothing in the workplace that could compare to being a full-time propaganda machine for her childern.

The story of what happened in the 1960s and 1970s is pretty familiar, but what’s remarkable is how quickly women took advantage of opening opportunities and adjusted their self-image. Reliable birth control allowed women to better plan their futures; feminism opened up the labor market and gave them a reason to try harder; and increased rates of divorce made it necessary for women to think about supporting themselves. Girls had always done better
than boys in high school, but now that they could see a real working future ahead of them they raced ahead. Girls had always taken more language arts courses, but now they began to take more math and science courses. In 1957 the average boy took one semester of physics and the average girl took 0.3 semesters, but within several years boys and girls reached near-parity, and girls continue to outpace boys in foreign languages. On standardized tests, girls began to widen their lead in reading and narrow the gap by which they lagged behind boys in math. They took more college-prep courses and more AP exams. High school boys, meanwhile, began to spend fewer hours doing homework, and to manifest more discipline problems and learning disabilities.

Within a few years women expanded their views about their own futures. Between 1968 and the late 1970s, the fraction of women who reported in the national Longitudinal Survey of Young Women that they expected to work by age thirty-five rose from around 30 percent to almost 80 percent. By 1973, only 17 percent of female college freshmen agreed with the statement posed by another survey: “The activities of married women are best confined to the home and family.” Women from elite backgrounds were first through the college gates, but very quickly women of all classes and races followed. By 1982, the old gender gap had vanished and women and men were graduating from college in equal numbers.

In a logical world, graduation rates should have come to rest at this happy equilibrium. But to the surprise of many economists, the gender gap began to reverse itself. The labor market was still paying a premium for a college degree, but women were responding more strongly to that incentive, while men were stalling. Now, according to the Census Bureau, about 30 million American men and 30 million American women have college degrees. But the balance is
elusive, because the men are on average much older. Young people live in a world in which the educational elite is as lopsidedly female as it once was male. And this imbalance affects every important area of life. Many women now have the choice of marrying down, delaying marriage, or not getting married at all. Men meanwhile start out in life internalizing the idea that women are more successful than they are, and that when it comes to the knowledge, drive, and discipline necessary to succeed, women are the naturals with whom men have to strain to keep up.

I
N 2010
, I visited a few schools around Kansas City to get a feel for these new gender dynamics of higher education. I started at the downtown campus of Metropolitan Community College. Metropolitan is the kind of place where people go to learn practical job skills and keep current with the changing economy, and as in most community colleges these days, men were conspicuously absent. One afternoon, in the basement cafeteria of a nearly windowless brick building, several women were trying to keep their eyes on their biology textbooks and ignore the text messages from their babysitters. Another crew was outside the ladies’ room, braiding one another’s hair. And when I got in the elevator I saw the image that has stuck with me, that epitomizes the contradictions of the new striving middle-class matriarchy—a woman, still in her medical-assistant scrubs, fell asleep between the first and fourth floors, so tired was she from studying, working, and taking care of her kids by herself.

When Bernard Franklin took over as campus president in 2005, he looked around and told his staff early on that their new priority was to “recruit more boys.” He set up mentoring programs and
men-only study groups and student associations. He made a special effort to bond with male students, who liked to call him “Suit.” “It upset some of my feminists,” he recalls. Yet, a few years later, the tidal wave of women continues to wash through the school—they now make up about 70 percent of its students. They come to train to be nurses and teachers—African-American women, usually a few years older than traditional college students, and lately, working-class white women from the suburbs seeking a cheap way to earn a credential. As for the men? Well, little has changed. “I recall one guy who was really smart,” one of the school’s counselors told me. “But he was reading at a sixth-grade level and felt embarrassed in front of the women. He had to hide his books from his friends, who would tease him when he studied. Then came the excuses. ‘It’s spring, gotta play ball.’ ‘It’s winter, too cold.’ He didn’t make it.”

It makes some economic sense that women attend community colleges—and in fact, all colleges—in greater numbers than men. Women ages twenty-five to thirty-four with only a high school diploma currently have a median income of around $25,000, while men in the same position earn around $32,000. But it makes sense only up to a point. The well-paid lifetime union job has been disappearing for at least thirty years. Kansas City, for example, has shifted from steel manufacturing to pharmaceuticals and information technologies. “The economy isn’t as friendly to men as it once was,” says Jacqueline King of the American Council on Education. “You would think men and women would go to these colleges at the same rate. But they don’t.”

In 2005, King’s group conducted a survey of lower-income adults in college. Men, it turned out, had a harder time committing to school, even when they desperately needed to retool. They tended to
start out behind academically, and many felt intimidated by the schoolwork. They reported feeling isolated and were much worse at seeking out fellow students, study groups, or counselors to help them adjust. Mothers going back to school described themselves as good role models for their children. Fathers worried that they were abrogating their responsibilities as breadwinner.

Cameron Creal is one of Franklin’s handful of male stars. He’s studying to be a teacher, which Franklin especially appreciates because he can reach out to the next generation of boys. His high school friends all started out saying they could go to college, but few of them followed through. “They see the commercials and think it’s easy to get a degree,” Cameron told me. “But then they get there and they’re just not prepared for the work.” Instead they got jobs in call centers doing customer service or janitorial jobs where “there’s not much room to progress.”

Cameron, now twenty-two, was the class clown in high school and when he graduated was also intimidated by the idea of getting a higher degree. He spent the first two years out of school working at a Taco Bell. But he was also living with his sister, who showed him that even the near impossible could be done. A single mother, she gets her three kids to school by seven, goes to the community college until three, and then works her night job at the IRS from six in the evening until three in the morning. “Like lots of these girls,” he says, pointing to another woman falling asleep on the bench in the lobby, “her day is
full,
and she’s
hustling
.”