De-greed. As always, I'm thoroughly behind the times on the fashionable blog topics, but I experienced a spluttering neuronal spark re the college gender gap. Have I bothered to verify, analyze, slice, dice, or fricasee any of the actual data on the topic? Well, no, but allow me speculate wildly on one possible silver lining to the shift of the college-attending gender ratio in favor of females. As middle-class parents who will be shelling out for college tuition in the near future, we blanch at the price tag and swoon at reports of the obscene levels of debt burdening new graduates. But many other parents like us must also be darkly reflecting that a college degree - outside an old core of fields where students are still educated in worthwhile things - is often, essentially, just a social symbol obtained by participating in an absurdly over-priced, taxpayer-subsidized racket that exists to keep a proliferating class of parasitic "sellers" in clover, while leaving the buyers in the condition of participants in potlatch, say, or an Indian dowry shakedown. Many can recognize the ruinous irrationality of the game, but no one wants to put his own child at a disadvantage. So the farce continues, as does the rise in cost.

However, it is in the nature of human societies that "prestige" and "feminized" mix like oil and water. (Hey, don't blame me for this. I didn't make the universe, I just live here.) If the boys are, for whatever reason, bailing out, then a degree (outside of fields where the course of study is actually relevant to a career in the field) will lose prestige and currency, and come to be recognized for the pointless acquisition that it often is. And then there will be a huge shaking out and massive downward adjustment of inflated fees to reasonable levels for young persons who really can profit from university training! And middle-class parents everywhere will smile and fall into peaceful relaxed slumber, through visions of hard-earned resources unravaged by social folly!

Hahaha! Oh well, a parent can dream. My economically-literate readers will no doubt assure me that no such subsidized racket will have reorganized itself to my liking by 2010 - when we could really use a nice collapse in tuition rates. (Though by all reason prestigious institutions should be vying to pay us for the privilege of training our extraordinary offspring.)


Posted by Moira Breen at 20 January 2006 11:54 AM
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Given how wonderfully your exceptionally gifted children will do with a college education, you should sell shares in them to investors for the college tuition. In exchange, the investors would get a slice of income for certain ages, say 25-30. Remember to put in a buy back clause so when your child founds the next Dark Empire, they can get out (relatively) cheaply enough to still be able to support you in proper opulence.

Posted by: Annoying Old Guy on January 20, 2006 08:40 PM

If the boys are, for whatever reason, bailing out, then a degree...will lose prestige and currency...

Ah, yes. Once upon a time, secretaries and nurses, like nearly every other profession, save the oldest, were exclusively male. Then, for various reasons, women began to predominate, and the prestige of these professions went waaaay down. I have often wondered what will happen to the public perception of doctors, when women come to be a solid majority of them.

Posted by: Angie Schultz on January 21, 2006 07:28 PM

AOG - Now I'm going to have to give your suggestion some thought. We have noticed that our heiress has a gift, and a love, for diabolical, jesuitical argumentation, so we were thinking of making a slimeball trial lawyer of some sort out of her, so she could support us in style in our old age. But if we IPO'd her...

Angie - Nursing started out male? Well, now that I think about it, pre-Nightingale nursing must have been male. But they didn't call them nurses, did they? And was that occupation ever really respectable? (I mean, for the ones who didn't become famous poets.)

Everyone will probably be driven out of medicine by the insurance industry before its prestige collapses.

Posted by: Moira on January 22, 2006 10:54 AM

Why are you paying for your grown children's college education in any event?

Either the degree shows a profit or it doesn't. If it does, the student will see the profit by paying the upfront cost himself, whether he has to borrow the money or work his way through school. If it doesn't, and someone else pays his way through, he'll still go and that someone else eats the loss. If some degrees show a profit and some show a loss, he'll be more likely to gravitate toward the ones that show a profit if he is the one that gets to suffer the loss by choosing the losing investments. And if he is exposed to the possible losses, he'll adjust his behavior to maximize the chances of the investment paying off (i.e., he'll study more and party less).

Posted by: Ken on January 25, 2006 09:12 AM

But what portion of an education the Bank of Mom and Pop was willing to foot wasn't really the point here, was it?

Posted by: Moira on January 25, 2006 10:10 AM

Sorry, Moira, but I think your dream will remain unrealized, although my reason is different. The current financing arrangements for college have introduced third parties into the transactions, which usually results in the price inflation we're seeing now. With subsidized loans, students are encouraged to borrow more and colleges are encouraged to charge more. The expected present value of a degree is compared not to the cash price of the degree, but the outlaid cash flow to pay back the loans. Nobody pays "retail" these days.

I'm not going to get into the market distortions caused by collegiate politics. Let's just say that college course offerings, tenure systems, and capital budgeting are not very responsive to the demands of their "customers," and leave the rest of the agency problem to another time.

Posted by: Mitch on February 10, 2006 10:28 AM

Well, yeah Mitch. I thought my use of the terms "dream" and "subsidized racket" implied as much, and underlined the whimshicality of my "solution". But as Fleck has been known to remark, apparently I am "not the model of clarity I think I am".

Posted by: Moira on February 10, 2006 11:22 AM

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