Letters to the Editor
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Fifty years ago you might not have needed a Ph.D. to do research in Biology. Times have changed.
To psychprof: Ever since the 19th century PhD's were pretty much required for doing research in any field. I don't have a PhD, since going to school, even MIT, didn't thrill me too much. But I am an inventor, and I am being forced to go back to work for a while to transfer my technology to a company that will commercialize it. It will also make me a tad richer. I'd rather be sailing one of my sailboats. Most PhD's don't indicate originality or inventiveness, but the ability to suck up to some prof and keep your nose to the grindstone while making peanuts. Other posters have made the point that boys will not compete with girls. The purpose of success for males is to get lots of pussy, not for some abstract socially redeeming purpose. My wife has an advanced degree from Harvard, and all I have is a pathetic bachelors degree, but I don't mind. She's in her 60's and still a hot beautiful woman, which is much more important to me than her advanced degree. The bell-shaped curve for "intelligence" in men is much broader than in women. So there are a lot more dumb men than dumb women, but there are also lot more smart men than smart women. So that says that there are more average women than average men, and that's the majority of who goes to college. So men will still rule the roost where real brights are needed, but the educated middle range will still be there to do the middle range jobs that don't require real creativity. There will just be more women than men doing them.
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How did I turn into the bad guy?
Ph.D.s are in large part "union cards" for research-oriented work, so people who want to do research often get them. I never said that a Ph.D. is the ultimate proof that you're smart, although there is more to getting one that just sticking your nose to the grindstone. But there are plenty of creative, brilliant Ph.D.s (Robert Sapolsky comes to mind) and my best friend is a creative, brilliant mandolin maker who never went past high school. He did an apprenticeship with a mandolin maker, I did one (which is what grad school is basically) with a researcher.
I am going to continue to disappoint RF, I see. I am not entirely convinced that there is a huge drop in the absolute numbers of men going to college. As to why more women than men go to college, I don't know so I can only generate possibilities. It seems clear that there are large chunks of males who find the idea of college to be "sissy" or in the case of some minorities, "white". My older male colleagues think that there is a macho, anti-education bias in a lot of young men. This would seem to be more of an issue of traditional sex roles than of misandry. It's my sense that misandry is mostly an issue in child custody. I am hard-pressed to see it in action on a college campus, and I honestly can't speak to the experience on a high-school campus.
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Are you sure you're a psychology professor?
If so, why do you seem to know nothing about social science research?
It's true that the absolute numbers of men enrolled in college haven't declined. Guess why that is. It's because the population has increased. That's why we deal with percentages. See? The percentage of men enrolled in college has dropped from about 59% in 1967 to about 42% today. And pretty much anyone can see that that is a significant development.
You also state that it "seems clear that there are large chunks of males who find the idea of college to be "sissy..." Apart from the fact that you both write and think like a teenager, what is your evidentiary basis for this statement?
And you suggest that maybe the reason men don't like to go to college has to do with "traditional sex roles." So what happened to the influence of those roles back in 1967 when men were 59% of the college population?
This is really simple, elementary stuff. If you're actually a child, please let us know.
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Ok
I am indeed a psychology professor. I am actually well-regarded on campus by colleagues and students. And I'm not going to engage in an insult-fest, so my posting is ending here.
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psycprof-question on the bell-shaped curve
I kind of like my thesis that the reason that there are more women in college than men is that there are lots more men with IQ's below 100 than there are women. Now we have "true equality" of opportunity and women can go to college just as easily as men-not true a couple of generations ago. Assuming that just as many qualified women go to college as men, there are just more qualified women. It doesn't matter whether the cutoff for college is 100 or 115 IQ, there are more women above that IQ than men. Of course this whole thesis is based on the supposition that the male bell-shaped curve is actually much wider than the womens. The other end of the curve, where we're talking IQ's of 140-150 and above, has far more men than women. Since we'll assume that they all go to college, even though the smartest don't really need to, it is no surprise that there are more women than men in college. I think that psycprof has a wonderful job for one of his PhD candidates to examine this hypothesis and write a brilliant paper on it.
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There are very few Thomas Edisons in the world and in the future there will be even fewer
the correlation betwen education and between high income and between education and high political/social/cultural influence is strong and getting stronger and in all likelihood this will continue. Or course there are indiviual exceptions and exceptions in specific areas but the overall direction is clear. There is no mechanism by which males, in any significant numbers, will be able to compensate for a lack of education when it comes to money, influence or much of anything else.
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I wonder if anyone has set up a private "DNA bank"
where you can put your DNA on file, under your contol, but have it available to disprove paternity/rape etc. etc. allegations.