by Hanna Rosin
TO SEE THE FUTURE—of the workforce, the economy, and the culture—you need to spend some time at America’s colleges and professional schools, where a quiet revolution is underway. More than ever, college is the gateway to economic success, a necessary precondition for moving into the upper-middle class—and increasingly even into the middle class. It’s this broad, striving middle class that defines our society. And it’s largely because women dominate colleges that they are taking over the middle class.
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.
IN 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.
IN 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.”
The student gender gap started to feel like a crisis to some people in higher education circles in the mid-2000s, when it began showing up not just in community and liberal arts colleges but in the flagship public universities—the UCs and the SUNYs and the UNCs. Like many of those schools, the University of Missouri at Kansas City, a full research university with more than 14,000 students, is now tipping toward 60 percent women, a level that many admissions officers worry can permanently shift the atmosphere and reputation of a school. In February 2010, I visited with Ashley Burress, UMKC’s student body president. (The other three student government officers that year were also women.) Burress, a cute, short, African-American twenty-four-year-old grad student who was getting a doctor of pharmacy degree, had many of the same complaints I heard from other young women. Guys high-five one another when they get a C, while girls beat themselves up over a B-minus. Guys play video games in their dorm rooms while girls crowd the library. Girls get their degrees with no drama, while guys seem always in danger of drifting away. “In 2012, I will be Dr. Burress,” she said. “Will I have to deal with guys who don’t even have a bachelor’s degree? I would like to date, but I’m putting myself in a really small pool.”
UMKC is a working- and middle-class school—the kind of place where traditional sex roles might not be anathema. Yet as I talked to students, I realized how much the basic expectations for men and women had shifted. Many of the women’s mothers had established careers later in life, sometimes after a divorce, and they had urged their daughters to move more quickly to establish their own careers. Victoria, Michelle, and Erin are sorority sisters. Victoria’s mom is a part-time bartender at a hotel. Victoria is a biology major and wants to be a surgeon; soon she’ll apply to a bunch of medical schools. She doesn’t want kids for a while, because she knows she’ll “be at the hospital, like, one hundred hours a week,” and when she does have kids, well, she’ll “be the hotshot surgeon, and he”—a nameless he—“will be at home playing with the kiddies.”
Michelle, a self-described “perfectionist,” also has her life mapped out. She’s a psychology major and wants to be a family therapist. After college, she will apply to grad school and look for internships. She is well aware of the career-counseling resources on campus. And her fiancé? “He’s changed majors, like, sixteen times. Last week he wanted to be a dentist. This week it’s environmental science.” Erin says, “Did he switch again this week? When you guys have kids, he’ll definitely stay home. Seriously, what does he want to do?” Michelle sighs. “It depends on the day of the week. Remember last year? It was bio. It really is a joke. But it’s not. It’s funny, but it’s not.”
Among traditional college students from the highest-income families, who can afford to go to private schools such as Vassar or University of Richmond, the gender gap seems to disappear. Incoming classes are often more evenly balanced between men and women. But elite private schools live by their own rules, and are legally free to consider gender in admissions. In 2005, a study by the economists Sandy Baum and Eban Goodstein found that among selective liberal arts schools, being male raises the chance of college acceptance by 6.5 to 9 percentage points. In other words, they are keeping some women out to keep their schools from becoming “too female,” as Heriot once put it.
Jennifer Delahunty Britz, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, in Ohio, let out this secret in a 2006 New York Times op-ed. Gender balance, she wrote, is the elephant in the room. And five years later, she told me that the problem hasn’t gone away. When it tips toward 60 percent of women, “you’ll hear a hint of des
peration in the voices of admissions officers.” In her op-ed she described a typical dilemma facing her office. A young woman from Kentucky had racked up an unseemly number of accomplishments, although her grades put her in the middle of the pool. They hesitated, something they would never do if she had been a man. “Because young men are rarer,” she wrote, “they’re more valued.”
But not necessarily more impressive. A typical female applicant to Kenyon, Delahunty said, manages the process herself. She lines up the interviews, sets up a campus visit, requests a meeting with faculty members. But the college has seen more than one male applicant “sit back on the couch, sometimes with their eyes closed, while their mom tells them where to go and what to do. Sometimes we say, ‘What a nice essay his mom wrote,’” she said, in that funny-but-not vein.
To avoid crossing the dreaded 60 percent threshold, admissions officers have created a language to explain away the boys’ deficits: “Brain hasn’t kicked in yet.” “Slow to cook.” “Hasn’t quite peaked.” “Holistic picture.” At times Delahunty has become so worried about “overeducated females” and “undereducated males” that she jokes she is getting conspiratorial. She once called her sister, a pediatrician, to vet her latest theory: “Maybe these boys are genetically like canaries in a coal mine, absorbing so many toxins and bad things in the environment that their DNA is shifting. Maybe they’re like those frogs—they’re more vulnerable or something, so they’ve gotten deformed.”
Whatever its origins, the problem of young men falling behind is becoming entrenched. In a 2006 paper, sociologists Claudia Buchmann and Thomas A. DiPrete proposed a fascinating explanation as to why. Both sons and daughters born before the mid-1960s into families where both parents were college educated were likely to finish college as well. Less-educated families of that period, the strivers hoping to get to the middle class, sent mostly sons, following old cultural habits. But over time this pattern has reversed. Now, in families where the fathers have a high school education or less, girls are much more likely than boys to finish college. If the boys do go, they are more likely to drop out. The difference is especially pronounced in families where there is no father.