What Does It Mean that Women Now Dominate Higher Education?

Erudite Partner has wondered for awhile, "where did the boys go?" They have haven't been in the college classes she's taught for the last 15 years -- at least not as many of them as girls of the same age. And her own bright nephew didn't want any part of college either.

I started teaching ethics at the University of San Francisco in 2005. It soon struck me that there were invariably more women in my classes than men. Nor was the subject matter responsible, since everyone had to pass a semester of ethics to graduate from that Jesuit university. No, as it turned out, my always-full classes represented the school’s overall gender balance. For a few years, I wondered whether such an overrepresentation of women could be attributed to parents who felt safer sending their daughters to a Catholic school, especially in a city with San Francisco’s reputation for sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.

Recently, though, I came to realize that my classes were simply part of a much larger phenomenon already beginning to worry some observers. Until about 1990, men invariably outnumbered women at every level of post-secondary education and more of them graduated, too. At four-year colleges and in post-graduate programs or in community colleges (once they became more prevalent), more men earned two-year, four-year, master’s, and doctorate-level degrees.

It was during the 1970s that the ratio began to shift. ...

For her new article from Tom Dispatch, posted at DailyKos, she did the research and looks at the implications of the growing predominance of women in higher education ...