Women Dominate Men in 7 of 10 Graduate Fields, and Women Are Gaining on Men in All 10 Fields
Not only do women outnumber men in graduate school overall by a ratio of 143 females enrolled for every 100 males, but women outnumber men in 7 out of 10 graduate fields of study, and the annual growth in female graduate school enrollment from 1998-2008 is greater than the growth rate for men in all ten graduate fields of study. Even in academic disciplines like engineering where women were underrepresented in 2008 in terms of graduate school enrollment, the number of women enrolled in graduate engineering programs has grown at more than twice the annual growth rate for men in engineering from 1998 to 2008. More evidence that men have become the "second sex" in higher education.
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So, why are men abandoning higher education in large numbers? Or worse, why are young men increasingly lacking ambition in the workplace? And what is the consequence of this pattern?
These questions are rhetorical. Men are abandoning status competition in all sectors of society, and consequently abandoning responsibility for it, and doing so in vast numbers.
We won't get the egalitarian society we fantasized about. We're going to get the Slavic or Mediterranean model of masculinity and the south american model of urban class structure.
In other words, the fact that women are exceeding men in education, is not a statement about gains by women. It's a statement about abandonment by men.
There is plenty of research on this topic. There are any number of books. It's been predicted for more than a generation. There is no mystery to it: We're creating this destiny for our boys before they leave grade school.
Fundamentally, girls learn to interact with the world through displays of empathy and wordplay. Boys learn to interact with the world through displays of dominance and physical action. They are growing up sensory deprived. And acting that way.
Never forget that women are natural followers of rules and guidelines. They fit well in the increasingly formalized academic structure. They also tend to take jobs where increasing credentialism dominates such as education, health care and government.
In my field of engineering, men figure out pretty fast that graduate degrees don't do much for you unless you intend to teach or work for the government. Foreign students (including women) see the degrees as a a source of visas and credentials to allow entry into US society. In this regard men may have figured it out faster than women that our overemphasis on university education may be playing out.
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