An article in Washington Monthly (summarizing a Lumina Foundation report) confirms a suspicion that I've had for a while; of those aged 25-29, 47% of women hold a degree compared to 37% of men. I ask this in all honesty since I have not applied for undergraduate scholarships for some years: are there scholarships that target men? When I was seeking to fund my education there seemed to be plenty scholarships that I couldn't apply for because I was not a woman. I never saw any that were just open to men.
I regularly see reports and articles discussing the efforts to get more women into the STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields where they are not as well represented. I don't see similar reports of efforts to get men into fields where they are equally not well represented such as (and I'm completely guessing here) elementary education and nursing.
College funding is a politically complicated issue and I wish that it were not so. I haven't done a lot of research but it appears that, with regard to gender, the recent political efforts to restructure accessibility to higher education have been very successful. Though it is not politically correct, the data seem to support the fact that our efforts have produced results that pass gender equality and are now significantly favoring women. I'm assuming that this was not the intended outcome and that with the victory of getting more women through college, we should rethink our choices.
Maybe the time has come to focus on getting men through college.
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