As a graduate student, I have had to research topics which having a resource like Google Print would have made infinitely easier and would have resulted in better targeted results (gender identity among Islamic women in SubSaharan Africa, for example). Students often ignore books as a resource for research, if for no other reason than the difficulty in finding what you need. The only time many wander into the dusty stacks at the university library in search of books is when they find one referenced in a journal article on the topic of interest. They turn instead to academic journals, in part because using Web of Science, PubMed, or any number of other databases makes it easier to find what you need. It isn't laziness--its the combination of being able to find the resources needed and tell if this material is what you're looking for. Combine uncertainty about the relevance of a text with the delay caused by interlibrary loan processing when your library does not have the book, a significant amount of time can be wasted. All too often, exactly what we need might be available to us in a book, but due to the difficulty of finding it, it goes unused.

The only thing that authors and publishers trying to stop Google Print are doing are preventing their work from being relevant. What is the point of a book if there is no one there to read it? And how does one read what one cannot find?

Poorly behaved children in public places are another sign of a general degradation of etiquette in society. Along with cell phone users who appear to have their phones surgically implanted in their ears and use them at every available opportunity without respect to others around them, poorly mannered children are symptomatic of a society that privileges individual gratification over respect for others. All cafe owners and patrons are asking is common courtesy. Surely that is not too much to ask.

"While women may have held the majority in higher education for more than a decade, men still earn more than women, still hold the vast number of tenure-track university positions. Women possess executive positions at less than 2 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Could it be that men aren't going to college because they don't have to?"

Or could it be that educated men already hold these positions? To cite these trends as somehow emblematic that "men aren't going to college because they don't have to" doesn't give much credit to the intelligence of your readers. Tenure track professor positions require PhDs, and the graduate school ratio of men to women isn't quite the same as at the undergraduate level, especially in the hard sciences and engineering which seem to be more likely to have tenure track positions than do social sciences and the arts. I also imagine that you would be hard pressed to find an executive at a Fortune 500 who doesn't have an MBA or advanced degree, much less a Bachelor's degree. It can take more than a decade to break into the ranks of executive positions at major companies.

We are also forgetting that many of the jobs that don't require or prefer a college education are also increasingly being sent overseas. To suggest that whatever financial advantage there is for men not to go to college won't last long.

In the end, it is a serious social problem when either gender appears to believe that going to college is something that they can forgo.

Oh, and as far as John Tierney's column is concerned, what makes him think the problem is that I, as a woman with one advanced degree and working on a PhD would want to marry a man who is any less intelligent or able to keep up with me mentally? Perhaps the problem for women isn't that men might not to marry highly educated women, its that highly educated women might be unwilling to marry uneducated men.

I just wanted to clear up a couple of things that have bothered me reading this thread.

1. Notre Dame is not Greek. It has no Greek system, at all. The dorm concept is similar but never displayed the sort of behavior that characterizes fraternities. Princeton Review isn't the be all and end all of research sources.

2. The Uniform Crime Report LeCastor cites in her post about 95% of all crimes being committed by men doesn't exactly say that. The only gender statistics it provides are for arrests, and even those, men account for approximately 75%. Give men a break. Citing sources means making sure your sources say what you claim it says. Thats just shoddy argumentation.

The article brings up some interesting points about how sweet cute little kids grow up and become nasty adults. And most of the other posters are right--its about children growing up with no boundaries and no limits and thinking they can have whatever they want. The XY chromosome set isn't to blame, and I don't think most people believe it is.