Women now make up nearly 60 percent of all college students, which may mostly serve to remind us that the ratio was reversed not all that long ago. It may have something to do with economics. It may have something to do with women not having many viable options WITHOUT a college degree. It may signify an anti-intellectualism among males.
Who knows?
Not everyone wants to go to college, nor does everyone NEED to attend. But considering just how much of a boost college grads get economically, this preponderance of female students should alert us to a future that may look dramatically different (better? worse?).
Women still earn much less than men in comparable jobs, so the baked in sexism and "biology penalty" (my term for women often needing to step away from school to have babies) remains.
As a long-time high school teacher, I consistently found young women to be much stronger students as a group than young men, though there were always lots of exceptions. "Sit at your desk and pay attention" sorts of classrooms tend to reward young women, who have always coped with such restrictions better than guys. I never thought the intelligence levels of the genders were any different but something about K-12 school was always a challenge for males
The Wall Street Journal did a major story on this last week and sounded the alarm, as news media tend to do. Oh dear! Change is coming!
If there ARE changes coming, they won't arrive quickly nor evenly distributed among social and economic classes.
But I, for one, am optimistic about this change. I mean, it's tough to imagine women fouling things up worse than men have for centuries.
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