Washington Post continues to lead…
The day after Daniel de Vise turned in a great analysis on colleges granting admissions gender preferences, columnist Petula Dvorak writes a good column about the struggles she faces with her own sons trying to adjust to school.
December 15th, 2009 at 9:37 am
I think the column is revealing. She simply has no intrinsic concern for boys doing poorly. If it wasn’t for the fact that she has sons, her attitude clearly would be the attitude of the talk show host, let every boy sink or swim on his own. Who cares about what is happening to boys as a class. But since she has sons (and apparently no daughters) she is in a state of cognitive dissonance. I suspect that, if she ever does have a daughter, heaven help those sons. And I won’t even go into her not mentioning anything about their father and any influence he might or might not have. But let me also mention one other thing she said, which was that women outnumber men in the United States by about 4 million, out of a population of 300 million. Overall, this is true. However, at college age (and every age from birth to 35), the men outnumber the women. According to this web site: http://ceic.mt.gov/C2000/SF12000/Pyramid/pptab00.htm which gives yearly figures by age and gender for the year 2000, men are in the majority until the age of 36. For instance, at the age of 19 they show 2,107,162 men and 2,020,693 women. So 51% of all the people in that cohort in 2000 were male. At age 36, women start to outnumber men. By age 86, the women outnumber the men by more than 2 to 1. I don’t know what the right numbers are for people in college by age, but let’s say that 2,000,000 of the 19 year olds are going to college. 57% would be female, or 1,140,000. 43% would be male, or 860,000. But in terms of percentages of the total cohort population by gender, you would have 56% of all the 19 year old females, but only 41% of all the 19 year old males in college. And, of course, for the marriageable mate question, you have the paradox that while women are overall in the minority, they are in the majority on college campuses. The answer for the females is easy. Expand their social horizons out of college, since they are in an overall minority at those ages. But for males the answer is different. If you are one of the males in college, then life is good. But if you are a male out of college, you face an “inverse” marriagable mate problem that is more severe than what the college women are facing!