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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28539299.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, such as race and gender flamewar. I realize it's not always easy to post about this topics without being inflammatory, but the subthread we got here is an example of exactly what we don't want on HN, and this was pretty predictable from the way your comment ratcheted up the inflammation.
I think this is an instructive case - if you look at the parent subthread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28539299) without this flamewar, it's clear that it's much better. Not that every comment is good or flamebait-free, but the discussion is more substantive and (not coincidentally) on topic.
This thread needs a lot more attention on it. Not only does it demonstrate how racist and sexist this community is, it shows nicely how complicit you personally are in allowing this to happen.
Compare your response to this racist comment to this:
At least a white male stands a good chance of not being born into a high crime area they have virtually no chance of escaping.
We suck at diagnosing and solving the real problems.
Trust me, it's happening.
Second, who is saying "white males" are the root of all problems? I mean, it's objectively true since we've predominately been in positions of power (European & new world) for the greater part of history. That said, I'm sure women can mess things up equally as bad if they were in the same positions of power.
Third, there's still an under-representation of women in STEM. Whether that's because a chicken-and-egg problem with visibility (or that women, on average, just don't want those jobs) is yet to be seen.
Excuse me? That's ridiculously eurocentric and only contributes to "visibility problems" you seem to care about. It may have been somewhat true for a few hundred years, but there are many cultures that stood millenia without any european influence whatsoever. And in the very near future, asian countries will surpass the west in terms of influence, as it has been for a long time.
All of humanity has the capacity to both oppress and murder en masse.
So... you then. You are an example of who is saying what you are saying.
Wow, you certainly have a shallow view of history.
> Third, there's still an under-representation of women in STEM.
And there is an under representation of men on college campuses.
Why is one of those worth worrying about and not the other? Or are both cause for serious concern?
All this obsession with race is just a way for the elites to urn attention away from actual solutions which would hurt their profits.
You're right, there's no insult intended when people say that. Apparently whiteys have thin skin too!
First, depends on definition of "College" and "University" that differs from country to country.
But overall, value of University education to improve your employability and skillset I think is being questioned by both employers and employees.
1. Some "Blue Collar" skills may withstand the test of automation better than many "White Collar" skills - e.g. I anticipate needing an electrician, contractor, plumber for the next few decades; but hopefully accountant, lawyer, travel agent etc less and less.
2. For "White Collar" skills, well... I went to ComSci university and it's not that it brought no value - but given the time, money, effort and commitment, it was very very low value proposition. I spent more time satisfying bureaucratic obligations and navigating the needlessly complex machinery than actually learning. (note I wasn't the one going to university for some "Party / Social Experience" - I found many better, more flexible methods than that:).
Not going to university is not necessarily the same thing as not wanting to learn and educate and acquire skills. And there is a whole spectrum today between free online education (random Youtube videos, manuals, free university courses etc), bootcamps, practically oriented post-secondary education, and then university.
Bottom line: I have two young kids, I want them to succeed, and I want them to be educated - and I don't know if traditional university is something I will encourage them to consider 10 years from now.
I honestly don't know however how that translates into a gender gap discussed in the article though; and article doesn't really provide a satisfying answer either :-/
While I picked up very few resume bullet point skills from college, I tend to find that having a comp sci background raises my game. Training in algorithms, complexity, plt and networking has given me a solid footing through my career that lets me tackle the hardest parts of the job. Stack overflow and youtube mostly help with the easy stuff.
Could you likely have learned everything that you got from your degree on your own while cutting out some of the less practical parts? Almost definitely. Would the person who isn't looking back with 20/20 hindsight know what to cut? I think that is less likely. Would a person without the formal structure of a degree actually gone out and learned all those same things with the same commitment? Some might be able to, but I suspect most would lose interest.
Sure your career might have ended up never touching a single networking component that you learned about in school. But maybe you loved that part and if left to your own devices would have forsaken other parts of the education to just deep dive on it. Would that be fine? Maybe. Or maybe you quite like working in the role that you find yourself in. A role that you might have shut the door to very early on without some structure.
So I think a mix of hindsight and overestimating a person's ability to just stick with a rigorous learning process that can take months and months (or years) without the benefits of peers, teachers, structure, and accountability leads to this belief.
I should mention though that as we are speaking about "value", the ROI on college in America is pretty rough. Even with all those benefits laid out, it is hard to make it too rosey in the face of a hundred thousand dollars of potential debt. Extra so due to the fact that you can acquire a portion of that debt and not even come out the other side with a degree.
I guess I could be more explicit; I meant to say that, for 5 years of my life invested, for X amount of money invested, for the effort and work and given my inherent and specific desire to learn, it was an extremely inefficient method of learning. All throughout my years, I always had the feeling that learning was not the primary priority for most of the students, teaching was not the primary priority for most of the professors, and instilling knowledge was not the primary priority for most of the staff.
They tell me that this changes post-grad; I cannot speak for that. But I've attended University of Manitoba and University of Toronto, and that was my personal experience. It is shared by several of my best friends who are also in the IT industry (I was a sysadmin, one is Java developer, one is a VMWare architect - all boring Enterprise Stuff compared to HN interests, but still a good cross section)
I enjoyed all the learning and knowledge that I gained in university and put high value on it! I think we agree on that 100%.
But I guess what I'm calling for is a reform (which I think is very much happening:) to increase the efficiency and focus on that learning and knowledge.
Most of the CompSci classes I took were completly useless. The only exceptions being Operating Systems and Compilers. Most of the CS classes I took were complete jokes.
In contrast, every Math and Ling class I took was very educational.
Arguably this was the most valuable learning I did as it's the most applicable to my current job. :)
It is so difficult to design a curriculum that accommodates such a wide range of experience. One of my professors told me that he shares the same challenges as some of the Arts teachers. Because, they too, get students who run the gamut from amateur to masters-level. And some of those painters or musicians are better than the professors themselves.
One of the ways to accommodate this is to teach a lot more about theory. Things you would not learn if you had taught yourself. The upside is that you are more likely to teach all the students something new. The downside is some of the students think the theoretical stuff is not valuable because they won't get to apply it very often. I for instance, know about Big-O but in practical terms I know I shouldn't nest loops and let some standard library implement a nlog(n) sort for me.
Education shows you can work under many different individuals and satisfy their requirements and processes. You know how to jump over hoops and deal with a bureaucratic process. There is value in that.
But that's not what I am talking about. And again, my overall problem with my university experience was inefficiency, which I can only ascribe to lack of care / focus as to actual education.
It's not like admin / bureaucracy existed and were paid/incentivized to teach me how to get around them and instill valuable theoretical or practical skills :). It was school of hard knocks, slow and painful and self-guided and frankly hateful; and I don't have to PAY to obtain that self-taught experience - I can be PAID to obtain it :). Or at least, I can pay to obtain it more efficiently, intuitively, with both better understanding and practical tips.
What you describe in the last sentence is a gate, and I to this day (20 years later) resent investing so much time, money and energy for a simple gate - sure "there's value in that", but it feels like Stockholm syndrome / rationalization of sunk cost trying to justify it; there are better, and let me say it again, more efficient ways to satisfy same goal.
Everybody's experience differs; there are people who enjoyed university and found it a rewarding experience. For myself, much as I love learning and CompSci, as much as I've thrived in IT and still enjoy learning, inasmuch as I now guide and coach my teams on precisely how to communicate to non-IT, look at goals, understand process etc - it was ultimately an extremely inefficient experience.
Nowadays, I take classes from vendors, community colleges, online, private instructors in IT and music and photography and whatever... short and long, surface and deep, and I love it all. "Here's money, give me KNOWLEDGE". Whereas, my personal university experience was far different.
You'd be surprised how much more valuable the skillset of navigating bureaucracy is to the skillset that a million websites are trying to teach you for free.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28543015
In short: it's not like university sets out to TEACH you how to navigate bureaucracy, and it's not like they necessarily succeed.
But the value of less directly applicable degrees like the humanities, social sciences and arts has decreased a lot.
I think in the past simply having been to University, irrespective of the major, was a strong signal. Nowadays graduates are a dime-a-dozen so you'd better have a major that brings real value to your employer.
Plus a lot of the younger generations may have older family members who graduated from college yet have little to show for it.
But yeah, I don’t think most degrees don’t provide much value in terms of employment. Even a large chunk of the oh so coveted STEM (notably the S) are probably a crapshoot.
I tried going back to school recently, hitting a complete brick wall at every step as a “non-traditional non traditional” applicant. Based on my experience with that I’m convinced out higher education system in the US is nothing except those two things.
universities can't keep charing exorbitant fees to give out a piece of irrelevant paper
You've completely misunderstood the point of university and the piece of paper. The reasons to go to University ranked:
1. To signal to employers that you are the type of person who can solve difficult challenges with minimal oversight
2. To build your network
3. To learn
4. Social events
The piece of paper is far from irrelevant, it's your signal to employers that you're a successful person. MOOCs and bootcamps can't replace that. Employers don't like apprenticeships because once they're over the employees leave for greener pastures. Even if they confirm you're self trained via leetcode or whatever they still can't be sure that you're able to do the other stuff that a job entails.
Their only purpose is authoritarian filtering.
Will this applicant unquestioningly jump thru arbitrary crazy and irrelevant hoops with no talking back about about the local dogma and complete subservience to their masters opinions? Do they owe a lot of school loans so they'll unquestioningly do anything for money? In some bad corporate environments, that is strongly desired for the individual contributors.
Most of the knowledge is out there sure, but the knowledge is hardly what’s important here.
Most well-paid white collar professions still require that credentials (and even poorly laid white-collar professions on that note)
I could spend a lifetime reading about engineering and following program curriculum to a point, but it’s unlikely I’d ever be hired in most engineering fields.
Pointing this out, especially in terms of arguing that targeted interventions for boys may be in order or that the education system in some way may be suboptimal for them, is an absolute political no go zone though. It's not a discussion that can currently be had.
- Maybe girls are naturally better at sitting still, and have always had an advantage in learning spelling and times tables that was not revealed until recently because the system was biased against them.
- Maybe a change in amounts of permitted physical activity has negatively impacted the ability to focus in anyone with a natural propensity to exercise, showing up in hyperactive kids and of course anyone with a lot of testosterone... or prenatal testosterone exposure, or whatever makes boys more likely to run around the playground hitting each other with sticks (I'm not an endocrinologist if you can't tell), in their systems.
- Maybe all we accomplished in the 1980s was replacing sexism type A with sexism type B.
- Maybe the performance gap is due to some kind of measurement error, like not comparing the performance of boys and girls at the same task. Maybe boys, due to (I'm just making stuff up here) being pushed towards math and science even if they don't want to do it, end up in more difficult classes and get lower grades in spite of equal ability.
The only thing I really know is that there's not an IQ difference between genders and the innate capacity of both groups, preferences, attention span, etc. notwithstanding, is about equal.
This doesn't seem to be completely true. The averages are nearly identical, but the variability is quite different. Most studies will show that males have a wider bell curve than females on nearly every task (Math, Reading Comprehension, etc.).
One researched explanation is gender bias in how teachers grade student performance. Studies done over standardized test has demonstrated gains for boys when grading is done gender-blind. There has also been studies done that looked at the gender of the teacher which shown favoritism towards the teachers own gender. One explanation for that is that empathy is easier along race and gender lines which then impact grading to be more harsher towards the out group.
The one thing I would not look too much at is hormones of either girls or boys as it has a long history of being abused, over valued and miss-interpreted. Estrogens does not cause girls to become emotional unstable nor does testosterone cause boys to be become wild beasts. The biggest effect they have generally is to regulate behavior towards social status, which if its not obvious has a big dose of culture attached to it.
Once a particular identity is designated as "privileged", it becomes untenable in political circles to acknowledge problems that uniquely face them, or propose solutions to those problems which can't be acknowledged.
It impacts predominately young white men.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/suicide/rates_1999_2017...
It's going to be part of our downfall if it hasn't already started happening.
Creating a seperate education system for each sex would likely create more problems than it solves.
The problem with education in the USA is its even more backwards focused than what happens with military strategy. "Better education" in the USA means optimizing for your great grandparents experience. If thats the opposite of modern reality, well, too bad, it'll filter for kids that are flexible and open minded, which ironically is pretty useful in the modern world.
That is to say, I don't see Pierre Poilievre types advocating for things like TDSB's Afrocentric Alternative Schools.
I do have to say that I was more than a little surprised that this would be such a controversial subject given the rather obvious patterns observed. But it very much was, and it still is.
Frankly, this experience was not positive for me, since it showed me how politically charged these things are, something which makes no sense to me. I mean, even your comment strays off right into who-is-making-the-argument, rather than whether it might be a problem that half of the school kids are falling further and further behind. I know that if I had boys entering school, this would concern me, but it's hardly even acknowledged.
(edit) thanks martzy13 for your comment about vocational schools, I didn't know about them
For example the one I went to had:
* Public Safety to learn firefighting and Emergency Medical Services
* HVAC to learn a heating and cooling
* Building trades to learn electrical, carpentry, plumbing
* Software development
* Medical Assisting (a pre-nursing route)
* Cosmetology for hair stylists and makeup artists
* Engineering and Precision Machining Technologies
There are plenty of other options at that specific career center as well.
A lot of my peers 'looked down' on this choice, as they viewed the "college path" as the only option to be successful in America, and considered this an inferior education.
Sort of. You're talking about college age, while the GP was talking about high school age.
edit: I'm wrong, this was for high school students. I did go to high school in America but I never knew about this.
I think the numbers of men going to university is just closer to what is a sensible proportion.
Higher ed has become extremely top heavy with administration, and those people DO need the women to take those classes.
Consider: The more women whom graduate with K-12 degrees, the better of a job the executives and administrators at my state U system have done. They get incredibly high salaries, in fact. The problem is they've done such a great job that they produce twice as many qualified educated K-12 young teachers as the statewide market can absorb. So my favorite Denny's restaurant waitress has a K-12 education degree and is making more money off tips at Dennys than her competitors whom got a job in public schools, where the average career length is only 6 years so they're already onto their second careers, selling real estate or working with her at Dennys. But having a K12 education degree doesn't make her a better waitress, it just makes her poorer.
The microeconomic solution to her problem is if only the top 50% in her graduating class get hired, she should have worked harder to be in the ever shrinking fraction of successfully people. The macroeconomic solution is to stop sending two times too many girls to K12 degree granting schools, which will kill the careers of the executive management at those schools so thats sure as hell never happening.
So its the usual American thing where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. The president of our stateside uni system gets a payraise from $700K to $750K because he did such a great job producing more K12 diplomas. Meanwhile the poor girl is worse off than her mother, financially, because she has enormous loans to get a vocational job ticket for a job field she never worked in.
I also do believe that one of the main things that allow people to get into university is the support of middle class parents who wish their sons achieve anything in higher educaction because of a preconceived notion about the relationship between employability and a university diploma.
I wouldn’t normally expect someone who went to trade school from 15-18 to be so proficient in a foreign language(English) like you.
Isn't it more that this is a cultural issue rather than there just aren't blue collar jobs for women because they're women?
Call me surprised. That's the result of racist drug policies intended to go specifically after Black men (and hippies): https://edition.cnn.com/2016/03/23/politics/john-ehrlichman-...
The biggest problem - and one that the author conveniently and completely ignores - is that the US justice and incarceration system is set up for biblical an-eye-for-an-eye revenge with ludicrous sentencing ("three strikes", decades for nonviolent drug offenses, people getting summarily executed by police regularly, ...) and not, like in Europe, for real, measurable rehabilitation.
Also, people in the US receive no education during their prison stay that helps them to gain useful employment after their release, they start with significant debts from the prison system and often enough from loan sharks, there is no meaningful assistance system to help them gain housing and jobs after being released, and forget about physical and mental healthcare - often, people will leave prison in a way worse state than when they entered: malnourishment, denial of healthcare, trauma from assaults both by fellow inmates and officers...
And finally: When employers and even landlords are allowed to do routine comprehensive background checks and everything about a person's history is up for a google grab "thanks" to public record laws, it is no surprise that arrests for low level shit like petty theft or smoking weed sets up people for a life in poverty.
I've said it before and I'll keep saying it: if the US wants to fix their society, the process has to start with their attitude towards criminals, criminality and healthcare.
Apart from financial crimes and financial restitution, there is little literal "eye for an eye" punishment, not to include capital punishment with which I disagree. Capital punishment is reserved for the most heinous of cases, though I think from a moral perspective we should stop it, since it involves state authorization to execute a citizen, and does not enable us to fix a wrongful execution if it already happens. The Innocence Project [1] has been able to overturn some wrongful convictions but I am not sure if that is possible after an execution. If we kill someone we cannot make restitution to that person.
If you'd like to make that claim there is literal eye for an eye, please provide well sourced examples of convicted criminals having the violent crimes they enacted on victims (shootings/stabbing) perpetrated back on them
> "three strikes"
Here are the states with 3 strikes laws, and dates of enactment
Arkansas (since 1995);
Arizona (since 2005);
California (since 1994);
Colorado (since 1994);
Connecticut (since 1994);
Delaware (since 1973);
Florida (since 1995);
Georgia (since 1994);
Indiana (since 1994);
Kansas (since 1994);
Louisiana (since 1994);
Maryland (since 1975 but amended in 1994);
Massachusetts (since 2012);
Montana (since 1995);
Nevada (since 1995);
New Jersey (since 1995);
New Mexico (since 1994);
New York (since 1797);
North Carolina (since 1994);
North Dakota (since 1995);
Pennsylvania (since 1995);
South Carolina (since 1995);
Tennessee (since 1994);
Texas (since 1952);
Utah (since 1995);
Vermont (since 1995);
Virginia (since 1994);
Washington (since 1993); and
Wisconsin (since 1994).
I hope you are not claiming that these states implemented these laws for racist reasons. Is that your claim?
> decades for nonviolent drug offenses
Did you miss a qualifier on that, by selling a dealer amount of drugs the penalties increased also? The last I saw the amount for cocaine was around 180 grams. Are you saying that someone with 180 grams is doing this for personal use?
There is a mistake in serious hard drug distribution, that delivery/supplying large amounts of people with drugs does not involve death. Due to the mistakes in cutting heroin/coke for example with fetanyl, people can regularly die from hot batches. A good example of that is the recent deaths of Fuquan Johnson and Enrico Colangeli [3]
> people getting summarily executed by police regularly
Please provide evidence of regular summary executions by police where the criminal did not have a gun, or use deadly force against the officer, where the officer has not been arrested and charged with a murder.
> Europe, for real, measurable rehabilitation
European prisons vary greatly. With fairly liberal prisons in Nordic countries, and a mixed bag elsewhere.
> trauma from assaults both by fellow inmates and officers...
I agree completely that we need to improve prison conditions. I don't think a sentence should involve assaults/sex assaults by other criminals, and I think the govt which is enforcing the sentence, also has a duty to protect the criminal, and to make restitution to the victims of crime, if it happens under the government's care.
[1] https://innocenceproject.org/all-cases/
[2] https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/three-strikes...
[3] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9960699/Comedian-Ka...
In USA, 1.1% of blacks are incarcerated, compared to 0.02% of whites. [0] Obviously the average black person does not commit 55 times the amount of crime of the average white person. Is this system something other than racist?
[0] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/10/30/prisoners_in_20...
I think HN is one outpost of this network. Imagine a 12-16 year old happening upon HN and becoming a regular. Do you see this person coming away with a positive view of higher education and being encouraged to pursue it? Or are they more likely to develop a cynical, contrarian view?
This precise thing happened to me years ago, and yes I did develop a cynical/contrarian view about it. I still went to school, but in net think I benefitted from not taking it too seriously.
But I don't think HN made me an outcast; I was on here because I was already an outcast and it was a place where there were other people into similar things that I was. I feel the same way about your broader point; I think the cynicism/isolation comes first (even if the internet might reinforce it).
It isn't that these boys don't have a positive view of higher education, it's that they don't have a positive view of any education. And this view is based on their lived experience.
Hard to imagine that language being used with other demographics.
Now I know some of this is just hype, but there was a sincere sense that the 'uneducated' were lesser people that weren't as capable of rational and enlightened thought. My actual college experience was informative, but I don't particularly feel like my two semesters of Rhetoric made me a sharp critical thinker.... because it was just slightly more difficult high-school English.
College is sold as essential, when in reality it is not for everyone. And, not having a college degree shouldn't be a de-facto deficiency.
In WWII were men really dropping out of school to work in factories or were they dropping out to join the military? I thought that American factories during WWII were largely staffed by women and men who weren’t eligible to fight.
Also, I don’t think that guy knows what fracking is.
Furthermore Executive Order 9279 closed voluntary enlistment for working age men aged 18-38 to prevent factory labor shortages:
>After the effective date of this Order no male person who has attained the eighteenth anniversary and has not attained the thirty-eighth anniversary of the day of his birth shall be inducted into the enlisted personnel of the armed forces
I speak not of education or the humanities in abstract but rather the degree proper; the piece of paper. An expensive document should be understood as a certification with concrete numerical price that can be compared to its effect on your earnings.
My advice to my daughter, who is working actively to become an artist, is very clear; stay far from college.
Lawyers, Doctors, require at least 6-7 years of 10k-50k Per Year. That's a lot of dough. When you involve that much dough... greed, scams, and predatory behavior are inextricably bound. Greed and education should never mix, I think it's contradictory. Community colleges are where the real education happens, imo
"We could easily frame this as young women victimized by universities selling frivolous degrees at astonishing prices."
It's not just young women, it's young people bro
It provides the following answers, which seem weak to me:
1. "[historian and economics professor at Harvard]: 'I worry they’ll come to severely regret their choice if they realize the best jobs require a degree they never got.'"
2. "...further delays in marriage and childbirth may ensue. That would further reduce U.S. fertility rates, which worries some commentators, albeit not all."
3. "The most severe implications, I suspect, will be cultural and political. The U.S. electorate is already polarized .... Those divisions seem likely to worsen"
It's cognitive dissonance all the way down.
1. Start earning money right away as an apprentice. No massive student debt.
2. Live outside of high-COL cities.
3. Skills valuable everywhere, instead of specific industries (eg. finance jobs only in certain cities).
4. Optimise/minimise your own taxes.
5. Housing is our single biggest expense in life, so build it yourself and save.
6. Easy to hire employees and start a medium-sized business if you want.
Maybe men are just 'smarter' and have realised this?
Also... who thinks gender studies are real?
> The Good Student, by definition, fits the profile of a typical B.A. who did not continue on to graduate or professional school. Now let’s define three more ability archetypes: the Excellent Student, the Fair Student, and the Poor Student. The Excellent Student fits the profile of the typical master’s degree holder. The Fair Student fits the profile of the typical high school graduate who does not try college. The Poor Student fits the profile of the typical high school dropout. Ideally, to repeat, “fits the profile” is all-inclusive, covering cognitive ability, character, background, and every other trait. In terms of measured cognitive ability, Excellent Students are around the 82nd percentile, Good Students the 73rd, Fair Students the 41st, and Poor Students the 24th.
> Results closely match common sense. High school is lucrative for all four archetypes. Even Poor Students can reasonably expect the resources they invest in high school to out-perform high-yield bonds. College, in contrast, is a solid deal only for Excellent and Good Students. Largely owing to their high failure rate, Fair Students who start college should foresee a low 2.3% return on their investment. For Poor Students, it’s a paltry 1%.
Of course your statement is interesting because I have a story to go with it. I went to a publicly funded university starting back in 2003. I had zero problem getting in. Meanwhile, I know a family friend who went to the same university after I had graduated. I want to say around 2011. He had some problems getting it. It wasn't grades or ability to pay. They wanted to try and get more out of state students because they could charge them more. So they sat on their hands until they got as many out of state students as they were going to get for that year. And after that when they still had some spots open they gave the green flag for the family friend. Kind of feels like college was threatening to do the abandoning in this particular instance.
A generation of American men give up on college - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436836 - Sept 2021 (776 comments)
> “That’s why we need both parties to offer a positive vision of college and a positive vision of masculinity. If male identity is seen, by some, as being at odds with education, that’s a problem for the whole country.”
The question should be, how did college repel young men? That's pretty obvious in the last decade and 90% of it barely merits an article.
However, the conseqeunce is likely a milennial middle class baby bust that is just building momentum as this cohort of women who graduated into professional careers ages out of child bearing years and the scramble for donors intensifies. Men who don't graduate are in effect mostly ineligible as partners for women who do, then other factors like poor fitness levels, choice paralysis, unsecured debt, housing bubbles, and lately a virus of political polarization are reducing the likelihood of durable matches for all involved.
I'd be less concerned with maintaining retroactive continuity on the college narrative and asking what is to be done, and instead, being prepared for handling the consequent bust this dynamic has set us all up for.
* Men accounted for 70% of the 1.5m decline in college enrollment last year * Women have outpaced men in bachelor attainment since the 80s
* Women have been told to get college degrees in order to secure independence and freedom for decades
* Men were 57% of college enrolled students in 1970 but since Title XI passed barring gender discrimination, the rates have been getting more lopsided for women
* Girls outperform boys generally in high school and elementary long before college
* Blaming "the feminist dogma of the education system and the inherently distracting presence of girls in classrooms" is dubious
* A better explanation is that up to the 1970s, men could secure middle-class wages on blue-collar work, but afterwards, that labor demand dried up and these types of men are adrift, and marry less since they also don't attend church anymore, and so live 'haphazard' lives detached from traditional responsibilities
* This has the effect that young boys don't have stable male role models, as men are more likely to be incarcerated, and aren't present enough in early schooling as teachers or as fathers in low-income areas
* The college gender gap is also occuring in "France, Slovenia, Mexico, and Brazil".
* Perhaps a blend of biological and cultural differences are at play
* This will have broad implications for marriage rates, delayed marriage, delayed childbirth
* This may have the cultural implication that education be seen as a identified with effeminacy, barring more men still
* "The pivot point is in adolescence, and the foundation is laid in the early grades.” This gender gap is an economic story, a cultural story, a criminal-justice story, and a family-structure story that begins to unfold in elementary school. The attention-grabbing statistic that barely 40 percent of college grads are men seems to cry out for an immediate policy response. But rather than dial up male attendance one college-admissions department at a time, policy makers should think about the social forces that make the statistic inevitable."
>The pivot point is in adolescence, and the foundation is laid in the early grades.
I'm not saying this is the cause, but it may contribute to poor schooling results of some boys. I really didn't do well in school until in the 5th grade when I had a male teacher who I saw as something of a role model.
You can get the exact same level of education online for 90% of the courses that universities offer. Trades are a different story when there's practical skills to learn however but is the exception to the norm.
Why would men spend the time going to college if it's been ensured that they're going to be in debt for the rest of their life due to the inflated ego of these institutions, thinking they can charge so much for degrees that really have no practical value. But then again, why blame the institution if there's thousands of people still lining up willingly?
Maybe it's not true at other universities, but at the two universities I attended it takes literal years for the majority of students to understand how to take the skills they're learning in a CS degree and solve real world problems. So, I dropped out. And you all know the story, now I write code and makes lots of money, woohoo. Now my father and father in law, both highly educated and financially successful people, look at me and wonder why they did so much schooling and worked so hard when uneducated programmers are making more than they made in their whole career. They're vocally questioning the value of higher education to people around them.
Where it gets messy though is that I have family members and friends that have completely or partially used my situation as justification to ditch education, and none of them have gone anywhere as of yet. I've tried to teach some of them programming but I've given up on that, because the motivation and drive they need to teach themselves is the primary determining factor of their success (in my opinion), and I can't change that. I know I'm far from special in this community of overachievers, but whatever it took for me to get myself in this position isn't exactly common among the general populace, and it took me years of watching my friends and family members trying to mimic my path to appreciate that. So now I just tell them to go to college.
Employers don’t train and schools don’t ensure people have necessary skills. Neither institution has any skin in the game.
Furthermore things are becoming more zero-sum with respect to employment opportunities.
A generation of American men give up on college (wsj.com): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28436836
Men Fall Behind in College Enrollment. Women Still Play Catch-Up at Work (nytimes.com): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28472274
In my state, where $20/hr buys you a pretty nice lifestyle, union building trades ALL pay $30 to low forties per hour and are essentially sausagefests WRT being "boys future jobs" and these jobs pay you around half pay to learn as an apprentice for a couple years, and require absolutely no college or student loans. A "journeyman" experience level "girls future jobs" such as day care worker, which is 99% female employment, pays $13.64/hr average in my state at that experience level and absolutely requires either a K12 ed degree (we produce twice as many degree holders as we have jobs, so optimistically the "bottom half" of degreed teachers end up as bartenders, day care, real estate saleswomen, etc). There is an associates degree program in early childhood education at my local tech school so young women can pay about $10K plus room and board and food, to eventually get a job that might eventually pay as much as $25K/year.
Like I wrote, most kids plans fall apart upon contact with reality much like the famous military aphorism about military plans not surviving contact with the enemy. However, the situation boils down to boys "know" they can get a great high paying career in the manly manual labor fields without a degree, whereas women "know" they need a degree and immense levels of debt to make less than McDonalds is willing to pay them, although at least their job is to literally hug babies all day. Maybe half the boys can't actually work construction due to drug use or weakness or just plain old laziness, but when they were planning they "knew" they could get those jobs. Whereas women know that even to change diapers for less than fast food pay, they "knew" they need a degree to compete.
The real story is very low paying, very low functioning jobs defined as "for women", require degrees and the supply/demand curve is such that they get away with it and the women hired will show up with expensive degrees and lifetime debt. Men's jobs that don't require degrees do not get away with demanding degrees.
No idea if there's actual causation there, but given the high cost of college (compared to previous generations), it's certainly a consideration.
As far as I can see, many master's degrees are not worth today it even if you pay no tuition fees. Many blue-collar jobs like plumbing pay better nowadays than your average humanities, social sciences etc job, with equal or better job security and only 3 years of studying instead of 8. So, avoiding higher education can be the rational choice.
In addition, there are major flaws in how students are handled nowadays. Teachers simply have no authority to punish bad behavior, and it seems restless boys suffer the most from this in educational outcomes. The system is increasingly designed only for kids who enjoy school and perform well even without supervision.
Personally I had no trouble with school, but I'm still not convinced that CS degree was the right choice instead of plumbing or something similar. The job market sucks for everyone except senior software devs.
Do people really think that this doesn't affect boys view of the education system? They see this, take the hint that they aren't welcome and go do other things in life instead.
And the worst thing is that getting boys to learn more in school is trivial. Instead of a mostly female curriculum why not focus on reading action books, learning about the inner workings of bombs and guns, looking at how a car engine works and similar? Put that in the curriculum and you will have the boys attention and they will learn lots of chemistry, physics, reading etc. But that will never happen as long as women are designing the curriculum.
Edit: Clarified the second sentence so it doesn't look like I actually believe boys are lazy.
Jordan Peterson - Why Men Are Bailing Out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LH16ympCb7Q
A sample set of new schools.
. Work oriented, basically four year versions of junior college. Teaches EE, nursing, CSc, accounting, etc. Higher quality (and cheaper) than current for-profit versions.
. Research institutions. STEM masters and up.
. 'Soft' disciplines. Not just history, cultural anthropology, and the like but also the newfangled xxx studies, diversity equity stuff, etc.
. Traditional old school 'classical' college. Essentially the classwork from Harvard in 1900. You don't need too many of these.
. Highly specialized schools like Berklee although there was a time when music was learned the old-fashioned way, at bordellos.
What we probably don't need is a world where most of the state-funded institutions are huge lumbering megaschools.