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Throwing more fuel on the bonfire of "women: what is the matter with them?"
On the one hand, this should hearten those who like to leave comments regarding feminism with "why aren't they fighting for the right to work in coal mines?" (disregarding that there was a history of women working in coal mines, this was considered terrible, and it was made illegal for women to work down mines).
On the other hand, it will dishearten those who think the solution to the TFR problem is "just encourage girls to get married and start having babies straight out of high school, don't go to college, don't be career-focused".
Right now, the way most economies in the developed world work, if you want a reasonable standard of living, you need two people working full-time jobs (and as good salaries in those jobs as you can get). Want a mortgage for a house so you finally can have those two kids? Both of you better be working your little behinds off or the banks won't even look at the application form (and I fill in financial details on said application forms for our staff who are applying for mortgages, so I can speak on this).
Want a good enough career to get those salaries? Better go to college and get qualifications, as this newspaper columnist says in his article about his teenage son having a work experience placement:
And that last is the important part: for a decent job, you need qualifications. For qualifications, you need college. If college, no early marriages and child-bearing. And the current economic structure is, as I said, both of you better be working or forget it.
So all the neat solutions about 'get women back into the home' aren't that neat or practical when it comes down to it. I'd love for women to be free to be homemakers, wives and mothers instead of "the only value in your life is work, and the only valuable work is paid work, so get a job outside the home". But it takes two to tango, and it's not all down to "if only women weren't so uppity, problem solved!" Businesses are pushing to get more women into work. Maybe the promised AI future will mean "robots do all the jobs, AI makes the economy so productive nobody has to work, UBI means you can stay at home and have three babies and raise them yourself".
Or maybe not, and it will be "if you're not working some kind of job, you are on the breadline, and if you want a good job in the increasingly AI-dominated economy, you better have super skills and super qualifications, so more college, more everything, personal life? who needs that?".
My huge, blaring objection is that this is all tied up in the same set of incentives that moved us to an equilibrium where the college degree is de facto required... even though it doesn't really lead to higher performance/productivity/pay in most cases.
Yes, that is what was 'promised', but in practice, college degrees don't confer extra prestige, status, or compensation.
The reason college became so critical is because more people started going, and there was a direct push to get female enrollment up.
I've pointed out precisely when Federal Education policy shifted to ease financing of student loans and encourage females to attend.
Quoth:
Increasing the demand for college and the supply of college degrees has various unfortunate side impacts, which Scott covered in Against Tulip Subsidies.
Remove this incentive, and make it less viable for everyone to attend college, relieve the 'need' for college degrees for many, many jobs. Save people from a ton of extra debt and four years of 'wasted' time.
Basically college is only a 'gate' for such valuable employment because we can't escape the Nash Equilibrium we intentionally created without some top-down policy adjustments.
Leaving aside that women who go to college sort into majors that pay less.
Leaving aside that they end up with far more student debt than males, and take longer to pay it off.
Oh, and let's leave aside that women who become doctors (and thus take up a residency slot) tend to leave the field early. Read that again. We spend a metric ton of resources to train up doctors... and we expect to get a lot of work out of them. We spend the same amount of resources regardless of the gender of the doctor... but for almost half of women they'll duck out early without supplying nearly as much work as their male counterparts. MASSIVE supply constraint in an already constrained and critical field.
But leave all that aside.
Try and articulate specifically why a woman getting a college degree would make her more valuable. Either to a company, or a potential partner, or even the economy at large.
I mean, really, lay out the case for why that is her most economically useful/productive course. I want to hear the steeliest steelman for it. (Bonus points if you don't reference the sudden spike in demand for female laborers that occurred during World War II).
Because I'd just point out that even IF you have an intelligent, driven woman who would accel in a college environment and could be extremely productive in a high-impact field...
It is almost certainly better for her to have some kids with a worthy male and use her talents to raise them as high achievers than it is for her to cut her reproductive window short pursuing personal advancement... which she'll have to cut short to have kids (remember those doctors up there).
We need more smart kids. This means we need smart women to have kids. There's no other way about it. Which means we need to be economizing for smart women having more kids... and that inherently pushes against them using their most fertile years on the dubious benefit of four years (or MORE! Women are more likely to pursue graduate degrees!) of formal education for a degree that won't substantively improve their lives.
And that's only ONE dimension to that argument. I'm not saying this is 'fair' or 'optimal across all possible universes.' But I AM saying its a massively preferable equilibrium to the one we currently find ourselves in.
(And this equilibrium suggests a lot fewer males attending college too, I'm not really making it a targeted gender thing)
And maybe AI obviates the entire discussion, but the other fun bit is that AI is probably going to make college completely obsolete even if it never improves from its current state. You can now get instruction from the equivalent of the greatest professors in any given subject for like $20 a month.
My kneejerk read on college is the upper class used to send their children to college to round them out and have them obtain their prestige certificate. The rest of society then got the causal arrow backwards and decided college was the key to improving normies and began pushing it as a moral imperative. Worse, it worked for a bit as a signaler, early results were accidentally promising and we've been stuck with this shit ever since.
Yeah this seems incredibly on point especially that it did actually work for a little bit which let it entrench itself.
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Yep.
A bit of cargo-culting.
"OMG all the successful elites went to college, and they send their kids to college, that must be the shortcut to success!"
And in very small instances it sure would be. Get a bright, talented kid in a room with the future CEOs and political leaders and they might be able to navigate that into wealth and/or fame (shoutout to JD Vance).
But the second tier and below colleges were happy to ride coattails on the implicit promise. Although there's probably still some benefits on a regional level.
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Historically there were multiple types of colleges -- the rounding-out kind were only one. Polytechnics, engineering schools, normal schools (teacher's colleges), mining colleges, and agricultural/A&M colleges were all about improving the students. The distinctions are vestigal nowadays, though.
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