Is US Higher Education Yesterday’s News, Especially for Men?

 

Is US Higher Education Yesterday’s News, Especially for Men?

Over the last two decades, we’ve dropped from 75% of Americans seeing higher education as a worthwhile ticket to success down to 35% today. Is that the cost of higher education has run triple the increase in the cost of living over the last three decades? Could it be the rise of labeling universities, particularly those with graduate and professional schools, as bastions of liberalism, “woke” and “out of touch”? Does Trump’s assault on “elite universities” – cutting off federal research funds, pushing tuition-paying foreign students out of the country and falsely using “antisemitism” (a bigoted bias that seems to sweep through a significant segment of Trump supporters) as an excuse to investigate and fine some of our nation’s best universities, depriving them of the financial support upon which their very existence depends – encourage fewer young people from moving to higher education?

Our largest adversary seems to be moving in the opposite direction. China is building institutions of higher learning, focusing on STEM curricula, and building the next generation of ubiquitous and widely accepted technology. As America’s top universities, under attack by the Trump administration, are falling in the quality rankings, China’s top schools are rising. And as the United States pushes potential and once major trading partners away with rogue and TACO-fluctuating tariff policies, China is stepping in with extraordinary new massive trading agreements, opening markets in Asia, Europe, Africa and in the Americas (minus the United States)… as the United States seems hell-bent to make our markets thoroughly unattractive. Bullies seldom win.

If you focus on the wave of machismo “Pete Hegseth” values permeating a rising segment of young men to focus on well-paying physical jobs… trades if you will… leaving “woke” white collar jobs to women. Empathy is viewed as a weakness. Of course, hands-on jobs, and the trade schools that support such skilled blue-collar labor, are essential and valuable across the board.

Where physical strength is involved, men have always prevailed in those fields. Jobs for women without a higher education degree are generally not as well paid as those skilled blue-collar jobs for men. So, how does all this impact the demographics of work and higher education? The headline: in contrast to male demographics, women increasingly dominate higher education, as male enrollment declines, and view higher education as a step to a more valuable career. Jon Marcus, writing for the Hechinger Report (and published in the January 20th Los Angeles Times, looked at the underlying numbers:

“Women not only have overtaken men in their pursuit of bachelor’s degrees but have also eclipsed them in graduate and professional schools, new data show… Women are earning 40% more doctoral degrees than men, and nearly twice as many master’s degrees, according to the U.S. Department of Education. And women now outnumber men in law, medical, pharmacy, veterinary, optometry and dental schools… This is not some distant statistical abstraction. Americans can see this quiet but dramatic shift when they take their pets to the vet or their kids to the dentist, need a lawyer or an eye exam, see a therapist or pick up a prescription. In every case, they’re likely to see more, or only, women.

“The main reason behind the increasingly entrenched trend: More women than men are earning the undergraduate degrees required to advance to graduate and professional school… Women now account for about 60% of undergraduate enrollment. Nearly half of women age 25 to 34 have bachelor’s degrees , compared with 37% of men, according to the Pew Research Center… Lisa Greenhill, chief organizational health officer at the American Assn. of Veterinary Medical Colleges… states ‘Men have a lot more options. They feel like they don’t have to go to a four-year program or a graduate program.’

“In the University of California system, new female undergraduates in the fall outnumbered new male undergraduates, 28,301 to 22,747. Women outnumbered men by more than 50,000 in the California State University system , making up 56% of the total student body, with 44% male enrollment last year… The number of women earning law degrees passed the number of men in 2019 , figures from the American Bar Assn. show. By 2020, the bar association said, the majority of general lawyers working for the federal government were women , and by 2023, the majority of associates at law firms were women.

“In medical schools, the number of women also overtook the number of men in 2019. Today, 55% of future doctors are women , up from 48% in 2015, according to the Assn. of American Medical Colleges… Women already make up significantly larger proportions of residents in specialties including endocrinology, pediatrics, obstetrics and gynecology, family medicine and psychiatry…

“Officials from associations of graduate and professional schools who are trying to recruit more men said the gender shift can be self-perpetuating. Men may be put off by what they see as the ‘feminization’ of professions in which they now are the minority, research by the veterinary medical colleges association concluded… ‘I’m not seeing a national effort to say we need to change this,’ [Claudia Buchmann, an Ohio State University studies gender studies sociologist, said.] ‘If anything, the opposite is true.’” Without the priority of higher education, we will stagnate… and women will bear the burden of advancing society. Gone is the zeal for higher education, spurred by the 1957 Soviet launch of the first satellite into orbital space. We need that back. We need both men and women to advance the job-making values of the modern era.

I’m Peter Dekom, and in a modern world where technology defines competitive advantage, glorifying the hard-labor past just might pull the entire nation into competitive decline.