The Cost of Pandering to Women in College

Much has been made regarding how women are attending and graduating college in greater numbers than men. According to USA Today, women are 21% more likely to graduate college, and 48% more likely to earn an advanced degree (Sheffler, 2014), and yet women make up less than 30% of STEM graduates (Neuhauser, 2014). Women instead tend to major in fields like English and Liberal Arts (Goudreau, 2010) which earn far less than STEM, and often require an advanced degree simply to find employment within that field. In reality, the much-celebrated college attendance and graduation rates of women have little impact on the real world when they major in low-demand and low-paying subjects. Despite women taking over colleges, men are still earning more than women starting out after college precisely because men major in more lucrative fields like STEM (Sheffler, 2014).

It would be bad enough that men are continuously shamed for earning more than women, and told that because women get better grades in easier subjects, that women are more intelligent (SourceFed, 2014) or motivated (Lewin, 2006). However, women are also given disproportionate financial aid to attend college, even though they are now a sizeable majority of college students compared to men. While data is difficult to find, using the University of Oklahoma as an anecdotal example, in 2007 women received 78% of scholarships, and between the years of 2008 -2013 women received 89%, 77%, 68%, 94%, 92%, and 100% respectively (OU SLIS, 2013).

Government grants are another major source of funding for women wishing to attend college. There are numerous resources available created specifically for women (Scholarships for Women), but none specifically for men, unless you count athletic scholarships, which are a sticking point with Feminist activists who resent that female athletics lose money while male athletics make money for colleges (Bloomberg News, 2011). It seems fans aren’t interested in paying to watch female athletes perform at the level of a male high school junior varsity team. However, if you put athletics aside, and focus only on the resources available to help men obtain college degrees, those resources are sorely lacking, while money is being thrown at women who are wasting it on Liberal Arts degrees instead of STEM.

One of the unintended consequences of ignoring men in favor of women is that there is a shortage of STEM majors in the United States; causing employers to turn to H-1B visas in order to import immigrants from Asian countries to do the work, as there aren’t enough qualified Americans available (Logan, 2015). Algenol, a chemical company in Florida is quoted as saying that they always try to find qualified Americans to hire, but are often forced to turn to H-1B visas in order to fill vacancies (Logan, 2015).

The H-1B program is designed to bring in immigrant workers to work in specific technical fields like architecture, engineering, mathematics, physical sciences, biotech, accounting, business, as well as others (Logan, 2015), in other words, the fields that men traditionally specialize in.

According to the National Science Foundation, 19.25% of scientists were immigrants in 2005 (NSF, 2009). The only reason it isn’t higher is that there is a “cap” of H-1B visas at 65,000. However, Gary Beach of the Wall Street Journal advocates lifting that cap, as the United States needs more skilled technology workers (Beach, 2015). Beach further advocates that public education needs serious reform in order to teach the skills needed for technology, but that this will take 20-years to complete (Beach, 2015).

Speaking of public education, Christina Hoff Sommers summarizes how the problem starts there, wherein Feminism has become entrenched by saying…

“Being a boy can be a serious liability in today’s classroom. As a group, boys are noisy, rowdy and hard to manage. Many are messy, disorganized and won’t sit still. Young male rambunctiousness, according to a recent study, leads teachers to underestimate their intellectual and academic abilities. “Girl behavior is the gold standard in schools,” says psychologist Michael Thompson. “Boys are treated like defective girls” (Sommers, 2013).

In another article Sommers notes “teachers who work daily with male and female students tend to reflexively dismiss any challenge to the myth, or any evidence pointing to the very real crisis among boys” (Sommers, The War Against Boys, 2000). In fact, boys are more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and drugged rather than receive help. Jane Collingwood of Psych Central notes that while adult diagnoses for ADHD are split evenly between men and women, 82% of teachers treat it as a male problem, with 40% admitting they don’t see the problem in girls (Collingwood). Coincidentally over 75% of teachers are female (NCES, 2013), with the number one reason men avoid becoming teachers being the fear of a false accusation of rape or abuse by a vindictive female student (Brace, 2012).

This fear of being falsely accused of rape is shared by male college students, as they are guilty until proven innocent in cases of rape or sexual assault ( Schow, 2014). Combined with the aforementioned lack of financial support, men are lagging behind women overall and yet remain the vast majority of STEM major graduates. All of this is happening while a STEM shortage is causing employers to import Asian immigrants.

Allow me to connect the dots now that we have analyzed the entire problem:

Girls are favored over boys in our public educational system

Girls are showered with money in order to attend college

Boys major in STEM, but not enough are entering college due to lack of financial support, or fear of a Feminist witch hunt

Girls are not majoring in STEM

Employers can’t find enough STEM workers to fill jobs and turn to H-1B visas to import skilled labor from Asia instead.

On March 19^th 2015, President Barack Obama noted:

“When these tech jobs go unfilled, it’s a missed opportunity for low-wage workers who could transform their earnings potential with just a little bit of training. And that costs our whole economy in terms of lost wages and productivity” (Obama, 2015).

You will rarely hear me say this, but I agree with President Obama. Having tech jobs go unfilled or filled by immigrant workers on a temporary visa hurts the whole economy and country, especially long term, as these workers will eventually return to their home countries, taking their experience and skills with them. We need American workers in tech to remain competitive globally, and that means supporting the 49% of the population that actually has the desire and aptitude to enter STEM fields, and take these jobs in the first place.

Of course, the problem is that the takeover of colleges by women (regardless of how rigged the game is), is seen as a great Feminist accomplishment. In fact, the politically correct solution is to throw even MORE money at women in order to encourage them to enter STEM rather than simply give support to the men who would be better able to do it themselves (Koebler, 2011).

This is how societies commit suicide through Feminism. They try to make women and men equal by tearing men down, and then wonder where all their skilled labor went. STEM has been routinely identified as a key indicator of economic growth (Katsomitros, 2013), and women are not up to the task.

An article from the Chronicle of Higher Education contains the following telling quote:

“We have strong increases for international students, which is good because if we didn’t have strong enrollment from abroad, some graduate programs would be faltering, but there are some particular concerns about where declines continue to persist for U.S. students. We are seeing a widening gap between U.S. and international first-time enrollments in engineering, math, and computer science” (Patton, 2013).

This is the cost of pandering to women in college: Economic suicide.

Bibliography

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