Since the end of World War II, Americans have increasingly believed that earning a college degree is an important factor in individual advancement as well as national economic and social development. Support for expanding college access and attendance have been evident in everything from early GI Bills to President Obama’s college-completion plan for 2020, which Anthony P. Carnevale, of the Center for Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University, called a “populist promise to put a bookish chicken in every pot.”
No wonder it came as a surprise, then, when in July 2017, the Pew Research Center released the results of a national poll: A majority (58 percent) of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents believed that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country, up 13 percentage points from the previous year. The Pew survey is not the only recent sign of growing public distrust of higher education: This year’s percentage increase in state support for higher education is the lowest in five years; tenure is being attacked and in some cases eliminated; and we hear frequent expressions of doubt about a college degree’s “return on investment.”
Various explanations have been offered for this devaluation. In the early 1990s, state institutions began raising their tuition, and tuition rates at most colleges rose disproportionately to growth in middle-class incomes. The economic downturn of 2008 accelerated the disparity between family income and college tuition and fees, while simultaneously weakening the link between college degrees and high-paying jobs. Anti-intellectualism, always quietly present in the American zeitgeist, became noisier; suddenly, studying the humanities was “useless,” and religious beliefs became an accepted counterweight to critical thought. Wariness of “cognitive elites” paralleled a growing suspicion of immigrants; both seemed to be taking jobs away from working-class white men, who resented the loss of income, as well as their loss of status as the backbone of the American economy.
Women, arguably, need higher degrees than men to compensate for disparities in pay. College credentials, then, are a tax on women.
But there’s another reason for public distrust of higher education that few are talking about: the increased presence of women. Now that women enroll, succeed, and in many cases, surpass men in attaining college degrees, the value of those degrees is diminishing.
Media reports and academic studies alike trumpet women’s dominance in higher education: They now outnumber men at most colleges. In 2017, women made up 56 percent of all college students and earned more degrees. College administrators, education-policy makers, and pundits have wrestled with this phenomenon — dubbed the “female advantage” — as it has unfolded not only in the United States but also in most industrialized societies. In 2016 the Higher Education Policy Institute called the gender gap at British colleges “a national scandal.” Americans have identified it as part of the “boy crisis” in education.
Even though virtually every economic indicator points to the value of a college degree, as women and minorities — whose college attendance is also rising — continue to need credentials just to stay competitive, a growing number of men are looking elsewhere to regain their cultural and economic advantage.
Moreover, traditional male-dominated workplaces look increasingly attractive to many men, and emerging female-lite spaces, like the tech industry, look even better. Men are leaving academe as a place for less powerful people to spend their time, money, and energy.
After the centuries-long fight for women and minorities to gain access to a college education, why are those degrees now losing value?
Three factors appear to be key: cultural anxieties about gender equity; the reality that having a college degree does not make up for other disadvantages; and Americans’ comfort with a two-track educational system in which all are theoretically welcomed, but not all are likely to succeed.
Historically, when women get close to equaling men’s achievements, a crisis ensues. Anxieties about gender fuel debates about other issues, primary among them education policy.
Nineteenth-century Americans worried that girls’ academic success could undermine the gendered order of society. By 1890, women were graduating from high school at twice the rate of boys, and women’s undergraduate enrollment had also grown substantially: In co-educational institutions, the rate of increase in female students was twice that of males.
That success did not go unnoticed. Both opponents and proponents of full rights for white women recognized that education had the potential to disrupt the separate gender spheres. During this period, the U.S. economy needed workers to support rapid industrialization, and men did not need much formal schooling to get jobs; venues other than college offered chances for economic and social betterment. By the 1920s, however, connections between schooling and middle-class employment had become more evident, and college became a desirable place for boys to invest their energy. The finding that college women were often academically besting their male peers caused public handwringing over the country’s first “boy crisis.” What good is women’s schooling, many asked, if it distracts them from their duties as wives and mothers?
The second wave of anxiety about males and education reached its height during the civil-rights years, when the gendered expectations of men and women were again at odds with new developments. The president of Radcliffe College at the time, Mary Bunting, characterized this struggle as the “climate of unexpectation” for women: They could go to college, but with the silent understanding that they would marry and stay home with children thereafter. Most college-educated women complied.
But women did not stay home for long: In 1970, 58 percent of all college students were men; by 1980, men and women attended in roughly the same proportions. By 2010, it was women who constituted more than 50 percent of all college students. As with the first and second boy crises, that success led to worries that “something was wrong with our [white] boys.”
Yet women’s academic success does not seem to translate to equal pay or more positions of influence; the increase in women’s college numbers is not evidence of a decrease in gender bias. While college-educated women have greater job prospects and earn better pay than women without college credentials, they are not equal to men — not men whose credentials match their own, nor by many measures, even men who have markedly fewer credentials and training. Indeed, Carnevale argues that women need to obtain higher degrees than men in order to compensate for gendered pay disparities. College credentials, then, have become a tax on women.
A 2012 study by the American Association of University Women found that women just one year out of college who were working full time earned, on average, 80 percent of what their male peers earned, even after controlling for hours worked, college major, occupation, and employment sector. According to Pew Research Center data, this disparity worsens as the years since graduation go on, though it differs according to racial and ethnic categories.
College women know that they are likely to make less than their male classmates; they also are fairly certain that they will be penalized for having children. The Pew Research Center found in its 2013 “Social & Demographic Trends” project that 63 percent of the millennial women (ages 18-32) surveyed believed both of those things to be true.
It appears that formal education credentials are becoming ‘something that women do.’
Long before young men and women consider whether to have children, their beliefs about what is best for their children shape their behavior in college. When Wendy A. Goldberg, of the University of California at Irvine, and her colleagues surveyed 955 culturally and ethnically diverse undergraduates in 2012, asking them about their attitudes toward maternal employment and their own employment, the researchers found that the norms of modern work were still largely based in male-as-breadwinner, woman-as-homemaker assumptions. And a majority of young women surveyed by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in 2015 stated that their plans to stay home with their (future) children influenced their choice of major; young men, on the other hand, demonstrated no such constraints in their planning.
The new, “hot” college majors — engineering, neuroscience, digital technologies — are built around measures of accomplishment defined and evaluated by male standards of practice that assume future workers in those fields will have wives, ex-wives, or partners who take on most of the child-rearing responsibilities and housework so that the men can pursue their own careers. Consequently, these majors enroll significantly fewer women.
When women do stay in the work force, their degrees generally offer them less occupational value than if men hold them. The sociologists Asaf Levanon, Paula England, and Paul Allison used fixed-effects models (a statistical model in which the parameters are nonrandom) and an analysis of U.S. Census data from 1950 to 2000 to determine if low-paid professions attract women, or if the number of women in a profession leads to lower pay. They found substantial evidence that female dominance in a profession leads to wage reductions. In other words, as women begin to occupy a job, its value begins to decrease.
No matter what the degree, no matter how many degrees, and no matter how many more women than men have degrees, it appears that formal education credentials are becoming “something that women do.” Ostensibly a place to gain knowledge, skills, perspectives, and connections, college may increasingly be seen as an extra requirement for women to obtain good jobs, while men find other places to build economic and social power. The causal mechanisms for this devaluation are multiple and intersecting, but not new.
Higher education may be on its way to becoming a redefined institution — one in which some women gain credentials to compete with men, but not much power to change the status that gender confers. Meanwhile, men have other places to go.
It is this alternative route to credentials, available mainly to men, that completes the devaluation of college. Except at elite institutions, where the degree is as much about powerful connections as it is about learning, higher education’s value is shrinking as a two-track system develops — one in which women go to college and men get credentials by other means. Since graduating from college is not as exclusive to males as it once was, “we need to consider the possibility,” the historian Judith Bennett states, “that patriarchal institutions can shift and change without much altering the force of patriarchal power.” Thus, it is possible that in accommodating large numbers of women, higher education is shifting its population, while simultaneously diminishing in stature as men create channels of power elsewhere.
Put another way, the worry surrounding gender differences in college enrollment and success may be a bellwether for a bleaker trend: that men are leaving college precisely because women are succeeding in it.
Researchers have noted this trend over the past 20 years. Judith Sturnick, a former college president, writes, “When there begins to be a predominance of female members in any area, the value of that area goes down.” Through corporate-sponsored schools and alternative means to careers, she asked in 1999, “Will we set up a separate track for education which will primarily benefit men, which will allow them to enter the job market with higher pay … while women continue up the baccalaureate track, end up debt-laden, and then wind up three or four years behind in a profession?” The writer Brendan I. Koerner, agreeing with Sturnick, speculated that “there may be a time not too distant when degrees are not so prized [for men] and skipping college might be a wise career choice.”
We’re already there.
The ascendance of digital technologies and rewards, the rise in value of postsecondary certificates, a resurgence of occupations like emergency medical technician and security guard that underscore stereotypical masculinity, and the creation of occupations that prize independence and keep distance from formal schooling have together created new paths for men to bypass higher-education. These forces have become increasingly apparent, but they are not a spontaneous phenomenon.
For the past three decades, the tech industry has been the location of so much cultural innovation that it may now be playing the role that universities used to own: sites where the brightest minds explore and create. These minds are primarily male, and they are tempted by the examples of men-who-made-it-big without college — Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs.
Postsecondary certificates also constitute an increasingly viable alternative to a college degree — for men. The labor market tends to offer different rewards to men and women who enter blue-collar professions: Men’s jobs in areas such as police work, construction, and auto mechanics tend to be seen as careers, while certificate programs in which women dominate, such as cosmetology and office management, are perceived as low-level. As Georgetown’s Carnevale told Inside Higher Ed, “Women are really better off going higher [on the educational ladder]” in order to get the same pay that men get from only a certificate.
A similar pattern holds for formal apprenticeships; in 2008, they were 90 percent male. The majority of apprenticeships lie in construction work and in the technical and digital industries — occupations that are ostensibly open to everyone but whose masculine stereotypes serve as unspoken but powerful barriers to women’s entry. Moreover, jobs into which women had been making some inroads, such as the military, policing, firefighting, and emergency medicine, have begun to slow or reverse gains in women’s entry, reinforcing the idea that meaningful, well-paying occupations that do not require college degrees are largely for men.
If it is the case, as the data suggest, that women are better off “going higher” in education in order to earn the same amount of money as men with lesser credentials, it is understandable that they would enroll in some form of degree-granting education more often than men do.
The significance of the increased push for minorities and lower-income students to attain college credentials, particularly via for-profit institutions, becomes clear from this vantage point as well: Others need to take men’s places in colleges so that the business of higher education thrives, even as the economic, social, and political power once associated with a college credential moves elsewhere. It makes Americans feel good to be part of an endeavor so closely bound with the American Dream, in which everyone has the chance to gain the benefits associated with a college degree, even if those benefits are expensive and obscured.
“Female advantage” and “boy crisis” arguments ultimately circumvent the greatest underlying issue in higher education: Schooling is seriously flawed as a lever for social equity. “Never mind college degrees,” writes Paul Krugman in The New York Times. “All the big gains are going to a tiny group of individuals holding positions in corporate suites or astride the crossroads of finance. Rising inequality isn’t about who has the knowledge; it’s about who has the power.” Women’s overall enrollment and achievement in higher education notwithstanding, on virtually every major dimension of social status, financial well-being, and physical safety, women still fare worse than men because they have less power than men to control those aspects of their lives.
We need to stop pretending that education serves as the great equalizer of American society. Formal education is and has been one of the most valuable human rights, nationally and throughout the world. American women fought hard to be included in the privileges of higher education; without it, millions of women and their country would be diminished in countless ways. But in America, the idea that women’s attainment of formal higher-education credentials has created gender equity is simply untrue. Men, with college credentials and without, still have power to disproportionally shape our lives. Until gender equity stops looking like male diminution, women will remain at a disadvantage.
Nancy S. Niemi is director of faculty teaching initiatives at Yale University’s Center for Teaching and Learning and the author of Degrees of Difference: Women, Men, and the Value of Higher Education (Routledge, 2017).