By Professor Doom
“Theese
eeese pure eediocy!”
--a
German professor’s response at a faculty meeting regarding accreditation
recommendations to put an outreach program to attract female STEM students inside
of an outreach program to attract female STEM students. The previous sentence
is typed as intended.
It’s no secret
that females are being courted aggressively in higher education, and I’ve
listened to many a (female) administrator bloviate about how females are
under-represented in higher education, how yet another program is to be
established to attract females, as part of the institution’s mission to make
education available to all, regardless of gender.
Despite the stated
good intentions regarding gender equality, I suspect administrative motives.
I don’t waste
time trying to explain to admin that giving bonuses to one gender over another
is actually a violation of principles…there are far better reasons to lose
one’s job than simply pointing out an everyday-type hypocrisy in higher
education.
Anyway, I imagine
the following headline caused an administrator or two to pump her fist in the
air in victory:
I’m not trying to
rain on anyone’s parade, but…are we sure this is a good thing? One might reason
that if more females are getting degrees, more females are going to college,
and statistics
verify intuition here.
Now we have a
problem. I’ve documented quite well in this blog what higher education is
nowadays, and, again, the data makes it pretty clear that most people that go
to college to get degrees are victimized by the experience. Most
students drop out without getting a degree, after all, so that
headline could just as easily read: “A bigger share of American women than men
are victims of college.”
What happened to
make the most common victim of our current higher education system a female, as
opposed to male?
As is often the
case, I can’t help but compare the Poo Bahs that run higher education to
tobacco company executives, and, again, the comparison seems valid, as I’ll
explain.
First, a bit of
history. In the 19th century, most smokers were male. At this point
in time, most people that died of lung cancer also were male—other than noting
miners seemed to get it more often, there wasn’t much of a connection to
smoking until much later (but cigarettes of this era were far less processed
than the cigarettes of today, which are
deliberately crafted to become more addictive). Females were, socially,
discouraged from smoking in this era, and even as late as 1908 a female was arrested
in New York for smoking in public.
As the years
progressed, lung cancer became “equal opportunity” and now females get lung cancer
at rates very comparable to males. I bet the gentle reader can guess
what else increased to parity with males, but allow me to be clear: female
smokers.
What happened to
increase female smokers? Well, smoking is a business, and it’s just good
business to seek new markets. So, a century or so ago, big tobacco hired
marketing experts to make smoking attractive to females.
Yes, tobacco executives also promoted
cigarette smoking to females as a way to increase their sexual attractiveness
(hard to believe, in retrospect), but note the targeting of “liberation, power
and other important values for women.”
I’ve often compared
our Poo Bahs in higher education to tobacco executives, although in the past
those comparisons are mostly how both seem to target the young and vulnerable,
and take advantage of the innocence of our young to trap them into lifetimes of
cigarette addiction or student loan debt.
Allow me to make
that comparison even stronger, by noting that, much as tobacco executives
ruthlessly exploited women’s desires to trap them into cigarette addiction,
higher education administrators suckered females into college loan debt, by
promoting how “education can increase independence” and such. Could it be that
women are getting extra encouragement to go to college?
It takes little
effort to find many, many scholarships that are targeted strictly for women;
while I’m sure there are such for men, they sure don’t see to get advertised
much.
Now, this is just
basic business, much as a drug dealer gives the first dose for free to “just
try it and see if you like it,” higher education gives females scholarships to
“get their foot in the door.” One might think that this means females end up with
less debt than males, but all the extra scholarships don’t seem to help:
So, much like
tobacco companies created the “smoking culture” of the US military by giving free
cigarettes to soldiers during WW2, creating a bunch of addicts once
the war ended, our “leaders” in higher education have suckered females into the
student debt trap, indebting them forever despite the scholarships. Once again,
the questionable tactics of our tobacco company executives far too aptly
compare to our self-appointed elite “leaders” in higher education.
There’s a sinister
side effect to the gender bias of higher education, however. It’s a trivial
matter to look around in higher education and see signs that women are welcome,
and men…not so much. Should I even bother to mention how a male might find
Women’s Studies type courses a bit intimidating? What of all the anti-male “take
back the night” festivities? I digress, but it’s curious nobody speaks of the
many macro-aggressions against males on campus.
So, is it a good
thing that women now have more degrees than men? Only if a college degree is
really worthwhile, and, bottom line, we’re finally starting to question if
education, particularly as education is defined today, is worth today’s extremely
high prices. Seeing as higher
education is now creating prostitutes to get degrees, and prostitutes
after the females get the degrees, I’m pretty hard pressed to believe so.
Next time around
I’ll look some more general answers to the question of whether the people going
to college even think it’s worth it.
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