What a remarkable change -- in a lifetime (and I'm not all that old) I have seen the end of segregation and a very major start towards the equality between genders... .
By Daniel de Vise
For the first time, more women than men in the United States received
doctoral degrees last year, the culmination of decades of change in the
status of women at colleges nationwide.
To view the entire article, go to
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/14/AR2010091400004.html?referrer=emailarticle
2 comments:
This event reflects the declining the status of the professoriate and not the rising status of women. Having a Ph.D. now is a winner take all game for a declining minority of degree holders - a small number of people (all men in the recent Federal competition for research chairs) win big, every one else, mostly woman, gets to do piece meal work for low pay in the 'non-tenure-track' stream. Even those like me who 'won' a full time job at an elite school had go to university for ten years, wait to be 50 years old, and work an extra 20 hours a week to earn as much as a husband with a technical diploma. The universities are really not doing a good job of teaching critical thinking if people buy the silliness in that article.
Not much of a victory -- men are simply dropping out of higher education and don't want to be saddled with heavy student load debts.
Brick and mortar schools will become a thing of the past where lectures can be viewed on Youtube. The entire history and knowledge of the world is available instantly on the internet.
As the previous poster said, University degrees are providing diminishing returns. But I don't share her pessimism about women having to do piecemeal work--the men who currently dominate the research chairs are just the afterburner fumes of past imbalances. Everybody has to start somewhere, and the women who start at the bottom today will be the ones in charge in the future as the legacy men retire and give up their positions.
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