American Matriarchy?

Rev. Sensing has encouraged me to take up blogging since I began commenting at One Hand Clapping during the major combat operations in Iraq. While it is easy to enter the conversation in a comment thread, the thought of staring at a blank screen of phosphors to compose an original thought worthy asking others to take time to read has always been to me an intimidation not easily overcome. But Sense of Events seems a convivial place to offer observations on the passing scene, even as offbeat as mine. Finally the time has come to excite some phosphors and see if the readers are similarly excited, so thank you for the opportunity. My hope is that they do not adversely affect the quality of postings here.

My first rambling was stimulated by an Instapundit link to a Reason article tantalizingly titled The coming American Matriarchy.

Author Jonathan Rauch's thesis is that the growth of the ratio of females to males on college campuses to 3:2 heralds the coming of female leadership so broad it constitutes the transition of America to a matriarchy. He broadly recounts the history of collegiate education in the 20th century to the present and concludes:

The puzzle is what happened next. In the 1990s, the pattern changed again, but the surprise involved men. The wage premium for a college degree continued to rise smartly. Women responded just as economic theory predicts that rational actors would: Their college attendance rates kept climbing because the more they learned, the more they earned.

Men, however, ignored what the market was telling them: Their college attendance and completion rates barely rose. Why? "That's the big mystery," says Gary Burtless, an economist at the Brookings Institution. Whatever the reason, the result was a new educational gender gap, this time favoring women.

The reason is probably pretty important, not a "whatever." If one is to assume that the decision by men is not rational, there sure are a lot of men suddenly acting irrationally. That would be enough to to make one question one's faith in democracy. And why should so many males start acting irrationally regarding such an important decision? It seems much more reasonable to look for the causes underlying a rational decision.

Rauch assumes that women have been making a rational decision by attending college in ever higher numbers because, the more you learn, the more you earn. This assumption can be questioned for a number of reasons. It may not be true at the margin. Or it may not be as true for men as it is for women. Or it may no longer be true for anyone.

At the top of the educational pyramid it is unquestionably true that there are significant economic rewards for educational achievement. But there is also no sex imbalance in the make-up of the student body. Student populations at the Ivy League are maintained at a 50-50 balance. And given the oversupply of qualified applicants, the Ivies can have any ratio they want.

So somewhere down the collegiate food chain, males are starting to conclude that they are better off skipping college and starting work. And given the pay for auto mechanics, plumbers, electricians and computer technicians, they may not be wrong. Especially as these are fields where they will not have to face competition from large numbers of women or offshore outsourcing or the reductions in middle managements resulting from the flattening of organizations. Of major concern, for national security reasons, is that globalization is also making this increasingly true for engineering students who do not attend the top-flight schools.

And at these lower levels of the academic food chain, women are more and more likely to attend college because they don't have or won't accept the alternative careers open to men. Thus they are left with alternatives that are more susceptible to the forces of the IT revolution and globalization for which more and more women are competing. So they have to pursue the remaining white collar jobs aggressively.

Another issue may be that there isn't nearly as much learning going on at colleges as there used to be. I do not know the figures, but it would be interesting to know if the percentage of students at the top-flight schools going on to graduate or professional education has changed in the last 50 years. I would be willing to bet that it has increased substantially, in part to gain the cachet that formerly attached to a college degree alone. So, if one now has to go to school for seven or eight years to get that big economic boost, it had better be good, because one has now reduced the number of earning years by 20%, and the highest earning years at that. It takes a lot of salary differential to make up that opportunity cost, especially at the margin.

So it is not all clear to me that men are making an irrational decision by skipping college. There are some interesting institutional and social implications that may flow from this. But the bloviating has gone on long enough and if anyone is interested in hearing the rest of the story they can demand a sequel.